Alan, you might be interested in Cory Doctorow's recent book "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" - he's a tech/culture critc whose work I've respected for a long time, and I found his analysis of the whole AI situation very helpful. He zeroes in on the way that AI is being pumped up for investors (not for users) and argues that the real danger is (this is my awkward paraphrase) not whether AI will be able to do my job, but rather whether AI companies will be able to convince my boss that AI can do my job, though it will in fact do it badly. He's more sanguine about AI and intellectual property issues than I am (I think that there is something different, and immoral, about using scraped text to generate new text, than in the examples he gives of fair use applications), but this is actually a minor point in his overall analysis, which I found incisive and convincing. I definitely recommend it.
Ohh, that sounds good! Thanks for the recommendation! This is part of what I was trying to get at with the “wide open future.” Nobody REALLY knows what’s going to happen. Which is all the more reason to rest in hope and not in our fears.
I think you'll definitely find the book worth reading, then. Doctorow is VERY keen on emphasizing our agency to make choices about how we use or don't use AI, and pushing back on the "inevitable" narrative.
Just yesterday I was informed of companies buying books by the 1000s chopping them up and scanning them into AI. It feels like an erasing of history, not that all that's been recorded is accurate. But I worry that when AI controls the narrative isn't the population subject to propaganda rather than truth?
Alan, you might be interested in Cory Doctorow's recent book "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" - he's a tech/culture critc whose work I've respected for a long time, and I found his analysis of the whole AI situation very helpful. He zeroes in on the way that AI is being pumped up for investors (not for users) and argues that the real danger is (this is my awkward paraphrase) not whether AI will be able to do my job, but rather whether AI companies will be able to convince my boss that AI can do my job, though it will in fact do it badly. He's more sanguine about AI and intellectual property issues than I am (I think that there is something different, and immoral, about using scraped text to generate new text, than in the examples he gives of fair use applications), but this is actually a minor point in his overall analysis, which I found incisive and convincing. I definitely recommend it.
Ohh, that sounds good! Thanks for the recommendation! This is part of what I was trying to get at with the “wide open future.” Nobody REALLY knows what’s going to happen. Which is all the more reason to rest in hope and not in our fears.
I think you'll definitely find the book worth reading, then. Doctorow is VERY keen on emphasizing our agency to make choices about how we use or don't use AI, and pushing back on the "inevitable" narrative.
Just yesterday I was informed of companies buying books by the 1000s chopping them up and scanning them into AI. It feels like an erasing of history, not that all that's been recorded is accurate. But I worry that when AI controls the narrative isn't the population subject to propaganda rather than truth?
So grateful for the encouragement this morning.