AI will create jobs, millions of jobs, for intelligent people to sift through the AI slop searching for pearls. It will become harder every year, so they will always need more people to do it. It’s unclear what happens when the AI slop outpaces humanity’s ability to filter it. I guess we can call it “the technological singularity nobody wanted”.
The pearls I am metaphorically referring to in this case refer to examples of genuine human content, whether that is an intelligent thought, a creative flourish, or a call for emotional connection. These still exist, there are still billions of humans on the planet with largely the same minds and the same needs that they have always had. But the way things are going they will be increasingly buried in increasingly harder to distinguish slop, disconnected from each other as the signal to noise ratio becomes progressively lower.
I think that’s overly optimistic. I sure hope the bubble bursts soon so tech giants will stop spending countless billions raping the environment and forcing it down our throats. But the tech is out there now, and it’s a panacea for spammers, scammers, propagandists, and anyone who wants to subtly manipulate people or push an ideology on a massive scale. It’s going to keep being tweaked and adjusted to keep it at least somewhat undetectable on some level, just like spammers have always done, as long as they can still push some of their slop through the filters. The bubble may burst, but the tech is not going away. Even if we outlawed it, that just means only the outlaws will keep using it. And they absolutely will, because the randomness and hallucinations don’t bother them. In fact it’s not even really much different from the tools they have already used to avoid anti-spam and anti-bot filters. Accuracy is not their goal. The barest hint of believability combined with sheer, overwhelming quantity are their goal. And Generative AI is perfect for that goal.
Almost all distant future hard sci-fi settings have banned or severely limited AGI, sometimes proactively, often making it among the highest universally recognized crimes, sometimes after a war, or sometimes unsuccessfully (in which case the story’s going to be about regretting it). Either way, if fiction authors can reliably figure out the inevitable plot line the technology follows, perhaps we will too, eventually.
It’s not about the concept of AI, it’s about current developments in generative AI, which is just one approach for it but has largely hijacked the term. This one could burst and disappear, hopefully replaced by something better, but the general field of AI would not.
Also, I’m not sure where you are going with that argument. Despite being the subject of stories for millennia, nobody has invented dragons yet.
AI will replace jobs!
… Maybe. But not a lot. And as long as they try, stuff like this will keep happening.
AI will create jobs, millions of jobs, for intelligent people to sift through the AI slop searching for pearls. It will become harder every year, so they will always need more people to do it. It’s unclear what happens when the AI slop outpaces humanity’s ability to filter it. I guess we can call it “the technological singularity nobody wanted”.
There are no pearls. It’s uniform, blenderized raw sewage.
The pearls I am metaphorically referring to in this case refer to examples of genuine human content, whether that is an intelligent thought, a creative flourish, or a call for emotional connection. These still exist, there are still billions of humans on the planet with largely the same minds and the same needs that they have always had. But the way things are going they will be increasingly buried in increasingly harder to distinguish slop, disconnected from each other as the signal to noise ratio becomes progressively lower.
The bubble will eventually burst and AI will mostly disappear.
I think that’s overly optimistic. I sure hope the bubble bursts soon so tech giants will stop spending countless billions raping the environment and forcing it down our throats. But the tech is out there now, and it’s a panacea for spammers, scammers, propagandists, and anyone who wants to subtly manipulate people or push an ideology on a massive scale. It’s going to keep being tweaked and adjusted to keep it at least somewhat undetectable on some level, just like spammers have always done, as long as they can still push some of their slop through the filters. The bubble may burst, but the tech is not going away. Even if we outlawed it, that just means only the outlaws will keep using it. And they absolutely will, because the randomness and hallucinations don’t bother them. In fact it’s not even really much different from the tools they have already used to avoid anti-spam and anti-bot filters. Accuracy is not their goal. The barest hint of believability combined with sheer, overwhelming quantity are their goal. And Generative AI is perfect for that goal.
Just like in the scifi movies, where robots and ai are basically non-existent.
Almost all distant future hard sci-fi settings have banned or severely limited AGI, sometimes proactively, often making it among the highest universally recognized crimes, sometimes after a war, or sometimes unsuccessfully (in which case the story’s going to be about regretting it). Either way, if fiction authors can reliably figure out the inevitable plot line the technology follows, perhaps we will too, eventually.
It’s not about the concept of AI, it’s about current developments in generative AI, which is just one approach for it but has largely hijacked the term. This one could burst and disappear, hopefully replaced by something better, but the general field of AI would not.
Also, I’m not sure where you are going with that argument. Despite being the subject of stories for millennia, nobody has invented dragons yet.