Some random thoughts on AI, or more specifically the LLM implementation of AI:
- The big tech companies are historically terrible at putting human beings first and constantly think they can outsmart earth/nature/humanity. They will make poor guides for how this technology is applied to society.
- I personally do not think the world needs more content, so the idea that AI will replace us and produce all that we produce at bigger scale presupposes anyone wants to consume it.
- There is a strong possibility we will further cement our distrust of content because we will not know its truthfulness and presume it’s endless computer generated throwing of spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks.
- LLM AI is trained on human content produced in the past, so it is inherently biased on our past not our hopes for the future. It quickly becomes an ethical problem if the ideas of the past do not produce a fair opportunity.
- None of this seems to be a benefit to humanity, but is shiny and neat and thus well funded in search of problems to solve.
- I think the tech and media companies are profoundly overestimating the usefulness of this as an economic tool.
- I believe humans as a species are tied closely to our tools in our evolution, but the transition from analog tools to digital ones have ceased to be useful to us a species. The quest to enable our tools to become useful without us always produces unintended consequences.
Finally, I leave you with this interesting take: AI has poisoned its own well by Tracy Durnell
I suspect tech companies (particularly Microsoft / OpenAI and Google) have miscalculated, and in their fear of being left behind, have released their generative AI models too early and too wide. By doing so, they’ve essentially established a threshold for the maximum improvement of their products due to the threat of model collapse. I don’t think the quality that generative AI will be able to reach on a poisoned data supply will be good enough to get rid of all us plebs.