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As California moves forward with new AI Regulation As companies continue to invest billions of dollars to build the most powerful systems yet, I hear a constant complaint online: Why is AI being forced upon us? What good is it? Does anyone really want this??
exist A recent Gallup polltwice as many Americans think AI does more harm than good as think it does more good. (“Neutral” was the most popular answer, though.) Fed up with the AI hype and the ubiquity of AI-generated text, many of us feel like AI is something tech companies are foisting on previously perfectly happy people, thank you very much.
Technology companies certainly, without a doubt, recklessOnly in AI do people claim their work is There is a possibility of mass death Even human extinction, and then argue that they should continue to do it anyway, completely unregulated. I understand where the public skepticism is coming from, and I am skeptical too.
But these real-world problems with AI don’t make every complaint about AI valid, and the complaint that “this complaint is being forced upon us” makes me uncomfortable.
One thing is easy to forget Generative AI It was all new. Ten years ago, none of the tools we use daily today existed. Most of them didn’t exist five years ago, or they were little more than useless party tricks. Two years ago, some early versions of these tools had been developed — but almost no one knew about them. Then, OpenAI provided ChatGPT with a friendly (not intimidating scientific) interface. Two months after its launch, the app 100 million active users.
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Organic enthusiasm has created a world that seems to be full of artificial intelligence. A new AI technology captures the public’s imagination overnight, and a large number of people begin to use it. This is Respond to ChatGPT Competitors doubled down on their own AI programs and released chatbots of their own.
You don’t have to like AI. Your skepticism is completely justified. But the world we live in today is a direct product of ChatGPT’s meteoric rise — a rise that, like it or not, is driven by the sheer number of people who want to use it.
There are good reasons for enthusiasm for generative AI, but there are also very real drawbacks
A lot of the frustration I see with AI comes when you’re trying to learn about something and you come across a poor quality AI-generated article that’s been mass-produced for SEO. It’s undeniably irritating to have high-quality text replaced by low-quality AI text. Especially when it looks good at first glance, but upon closer reading you realize it’s incoherent, which is quite common. Many of us have had this experience, and it does pose a serious threat to the culture of sharing authentic work that makes the internet great.
While “people trying to put AI shit in our faces” is a very obvious consequence of the AI boom, Cheating on exams and the so-called The Death of ArtThe valuable uses of artificial intelligence are often not so obvious. But it does have these uses: Very helpful for programmersso that the new type Cool and imaginative gameand provide rudimentary text editor functionality for those who cannot afford a text editor.
I find AI useless for writing, but I use it frequently to extract text from screenshots or images that I would previously have typed out myself or paid a service to do. It’s perfect for inventing names for fantasy characters for my weekend D&D games. It also comes in handy for rewriting text at an easier-to-read level so I can plan activities for my kids. In the right areas, it really does feel like a tool for the imagination, letting you jump from vague concepts to real results.
Again, this technology is so new. It feels like we’re watching the first light bulb. Debating whether electricity is really an improvement Or a party trick. Even if we manage to stop the race to build more and more powerful AI systems without supervision (which I really think we should), there is still a lot to be discovered about how to effectively use the systems we already have.
AI chatbots are ridiculed for being mediocre, but if every small business had access to 24/7 customer service chat services at a low cost, it would actually be easier for them to compete with the big businesses that already have these services. AI will likely make this possible in the next few years. If people can more easily implement their ideas, that’s a good thing. If texts that they found difficult and confusing to read can now be understood by them, that’s also a good thing.
AI can be used to check the quality of work, not just generate mediocre work. High-quality automatic text review We haven’t yet developed an AI that can detect statistical errors and misconduct in scientific papers, but if we did, it would be extremely valuable. AI can be used to write cheap, bad papers, but it can also provide quite useful feedback on first drafts of an article—something many authors wish they had but don’t get.
Many of the annoying things about AI are the product of a culture that has yet to adapt and respond, either to regulation or further innovation. I hope AI companies are more cautious in deploying technologies that make the internet less usable overnight, but I also believe we have the ability to adapt. Facebook was flooded with confusing AI spam over the past three months, but the company tweaked some of its content filters and now (at least in my feed) the spam is largely gone.
The ease of posting meaningless marketing copy is a challenge for search engines, which used to assume that having a lot of text makes a source more authoritative. But frankly, this was a false assumption even before ChatGPT came along, and search engines just had to adapt and figure out how to surface quality work.
Over time, all the backlash, complaints, and consumer behavior will shape the future of AI — and we can work together to make it better.
That’s why the AI outcomes I worry about have to do with building extremely powerful systems without oversight. Our society can adapt to a lot of things — if we have time to react, adjust, regulate when appropriate, and learn new habits. AI may currently have more bad applications than good, but over time we can find and invest in the good ones. We’ll only really be in trouble if human values stop being the primary input: if we inadvertently give up more and more of our Decision-making power is handed over to artificial intelligence. We might do this! I’m so nervous!
But I’m not too worried about there being a lot of bad AI content, or getting a lot of emails pushing unnecessary AI products. We’re in the early stages of figuring out how to make this tool useful, and that’s okay.
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