It's just the start, it's about to steal the joy of everything in life pretty soon.
I imagine scenarios where AI could be given complete authority to decide who is hired/fired, who gets medical care, who gets food, who gets utilities (water/electricity/natural gas) to their homes, who gets disaster relief, etc. Quite frightening when you think about it. If AI decided to cancel you (and it had this level of authority) your very existence would be in danger.
I have a hobby with natural photos, and in the last 2 years, I have stopped spending time browsing pages as most of them are garbages generated by AI.
One thing many people hype about generative AI as they believe human also make mistake the same way as AI do, so at worst you have something similar to human mistake. Yes, but the volumes generated by AI are at magnitude bigger, and only a limited amount of human can validate and filter it out. If there is nothing change, this volumes of garbages will surely overflow and there is no way we can differentiate bad and good, fake and authentic contents.
We'll lift millions in the "global south" out of poverty by providing the tools to criminals and foreign adversaries that drive demand for cheaply-staffed high-rep social media account farms.
What a time to be alive. What frontiers we are exploring.
Talking to people online is in fact a way that some people get socialization and develop writing skills. If my prognostication is correct and people give up even trying to interact on most websites because "it's not worth starting a conversation only to find out 10 minutes later that they're a bot" or "no one listens to my opinion because that's what all the bots say so they don't think I'm real", the effect is to make the web even more "read-only" where people are discouraged from sharing themselves.
That craving is a deeper more primalistic emotion than hunger or thirst for many people (and animals) - boiling it down to "muh capitalism" is just disingenuous.
Why practice writing if generative ML can create a poem or short story for you?
In that regard you're best off just sitting down in front of a screen and consuming content generated by ML.
And from the example in the original blog post the author had the generative ML do the fun stuff in solving the problem and all they did was drudge work cleaning it up and submitting it. Very productive from the company perspective but reminds me a lot of low thought factory processes.
Making art, music, painting, are all creative and productive endevours, so when you're saying to be okay not being productive to me it means to be okay being a couch vegetable. We need the occasional rest but I don't want generative ML to do all the creative and rewarding things.
Instead, go outside and consume nature. Consume a sunset, not a TV show.
Do you really think the authoritarian elites will let the unwashed masses with no income do whatever the hell they want? Can you really say that after COVID lockdowns demonstrated their true colors?
None of the other capitalism-alternatives have historically afforded the kind of luxury you're suggesting either. Quite the opposite, in fact.
No, not really. They're useful but not revolutionary for actual productive work, and I'm being generous in dubbing some AI-based products themselves "productive" (I eagerly await the studies that I'm sure the companies building these things will not bother to do, proving that these are cost/benefit better than other approaches they're replacing—I definitely don't consider it certain that they are).
They shine when the fewest shits are given, which is mostly work that didn't need to be done in the first place, and... mass scams/astroturfing/spam. Hooray.
I don't really see this balance tipping much with the general approach the field's pursuing now.
I’m not excited about AI technologies that replace human capabilities, like pretty much everything that seems to be getting investment dollars these days.
AI-generated art aside (which is mostly terrible), I’m already having a tough time telling what’s real and what’s not online. The thought of this bleeding into daily life in big ways is depressing.
I’m also not thrilled about a generation of people that struggle to write a paragraph of critical or original thought because of AI dependency.
The last act of Up was supposed to be a warning, not an end-goal.
When someone figured that space can bring profit too, we got some developments in space travel as well.