Does anyone still use email for that?
We all still HAVE email addresses, but the vast majority of our communication has moved elsewhere.
Now all email is used for is receiving spam from companies and con artists.
The same thing happened with the telephone. It's not just text messaging that killed phone calls, it's also the explosion of scam callers. People don't trust incoming phone calls anymore.
I see AI being used this way online already, turning everything into untrustworthy slop.
Productivity boosters can be used to make things worse far more easily and quickly than they can be used to make things better. And there will always be scumbags out there who are willing and eager to take advantage of the new power to pull everyone into the mud with the.
Sure. Same as in the olden days. Txt for short form, email for long form. Email for the infrequently contacted.
Even back when I used SM, I never comm'd with IRL people on SM. SM was 100% internet people.
No it isn't, unless you are 12 maybe.
The internet as a whole isn't that. By and large, you can curate your experience and visit only the places you want to visit. So why exactly would the mere existence of generative AI make an average high-quality website suddenly do a 180 and destroy itself?
I won't debate that garbage data will probably be easier to generate and there will be more of it, but the argument feels one-sided. People are talking like the only genuine use of generative AI is generating bad data and helping scammers, despite it opening a lot of other possibilities. It's completely unbalanced.
Only if your product is bullshit.
Never change
Books were seen by intellectuals as being the downfall of society. If everyone is educated they'll challenge dogma of the church, for one.
So looking at prior transformational technology I think we'll be just fine. Life may be forever changed for sure, but I think we'll crack reliability and we'll just cope with intelligence being a non-scarce commodity available to anyone.
But this was a correct prediction.
It took the Church down a few pegs and let corporations fill that void. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and this time they aren't making the mistake of committing doctrine to paper.
> we'll just cope with intelligence being a non-scarce commodity available to anyone.
Or we'll just poison the "intelligence" available to the masses.
And yet the sky didn't fall.
> Or we'll just poison the "intelligence"
We really don't know how that will pan out. All I have is history to inform me, and even the most radical revolutions have worked out with humans continuing to move forward with increased capacity and better living conditions overall. The new boss is way better than the old.
Now, let me tell you about this man, his 95 theses and a thirty years war. Europe did emerge better from it all, but the cost was high, very high.
The only thing that has changed is the speed of access. Before LLMs went mainstream, you could buy whatever book you wanted and read it. No one would stop you from it.
You still should have a professional look over the work and analyze that it is correct. The output is only as good as the input on both sides (both from the training data and the user's prompt)
The skill today is the application of that knowledge. If an LLM can provide the data context, and the application advice and you perform what it says, congrats you now have a doctor's brain on tap for your own personal usage. The doctor has it in their head, you have it in a device. The net differences are immaterial IMO.
I don't think we can/should do this on today's LLMs, but if we continue advancing in the same way, and as-good-as-human reliability is achieved, the intelligence of a doctor is in your pocket whenever you want it.
And just like you say you know addresses because you have an address book, you'll know medicine because you have it immediately on-tap. Instead of holding all of that in your own memory, instead of having to use your own critical thinking (or lack thereof), just offload it to the LLM in your pocket.
We do this all the time with tools. Who now knows how to cut down a tree but lives in a house made of milled trees? There are so many lost skills that we defer to either other people or machines and yet each individual lives with the benefit of all those skills.
Tools make cognitive bypasses for us to benefit from. When we can make intelligence a tool, I assume we can offload a lot of our intelligence, or at least acquire new intelligence we didn't have before.
WebMD is the same whoever looks at it. An LLM can adapt to your clarification questions and meet you on your comprehension level. So no, it's not as naive as you are insisting.
An LLM is the doctor in your pocket. It's yours to use, and whether it is in your head (like a doctor who had to take exams to prove they really had it in their head), or in your pocket makes no difference in your ability to achieve a task.
"Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."
Well, if I can acquire knowledge from the LLM, and apply it using the LLM's instructions, I now have achieved intelligence without doing an exam.
Problem is, I can lose my LLM. A doctor could lose their mental faculties though.