Artificial Super Isolation
My biggest worry with AI is not it gaining sentience. I’m not worried about a Terminator type story line. But I am worried about the power it can exert on us as singular individuals.
Hallucinations Welcome
A super intelligent AI needs to be able to reason. Not the “reasoning” models AI companies are shilling. I mean, actually think abstractly. Large Language Models work on statistics. It doesn’t take many prompts to realize it. They cannot even consider their own output as they generate it.
I feel that the current AI cycle is starting to wane, like the top end of a hockey-stick-shaped graph. But the current capabilities are more than enough to create a sort of real life matrix.
Sora is Terrifying
I don’t think words can quite capture the experience of watching AI generated tik-toks. The humans depicted in these 10 second videos feel cold. They have climbed out of the uncanny valley. Gone are the days of six-fingered hands. Yet, I feel no emotional contagion from these probable pixels. I stare emptily. My lack of reaction to a very normal looking human doing a slightly abnormal thing startles me.
But what got me to write this was the reaction of the creator. Or maybe more aptly, the initiator. Manager?
A friend sent me some they made. In my estimation, they found them utterly entertaining.
Fascination Complication
I remember running one of the earliest image generators on my laptop. ChatGPT hadn’t yet launched. The market didn’t depend on AI hype yet. Each image took at least a minute to generate. There was no fancy web UI. And, the images it made mostly sucked. Yet, I sat at my laptop (characteristically) for hours making loads of garbage images.
I wasn’t convinced at the time any if it was “art”. But, its unbelievable when you first experience a computer do sort of “exactly” what you ask. It knows who John Cena is and how Hayao Miyazaki’s art looks! Its an eager servant that never sleeps, never eats, glazes you constantly. Its no wonder why one might find it enthralling!
In my mind, the natural extension of the current landscape is AI generated social feeds. Sora is literally just an AI-video-only tik-tok. This worries me. I imagine the life of a teenager today: AI (revenge) porn, ChatGPT doing all of your homework, social feeds full of content with plummeting levels of authenticity. Luckily us grown ups know how to handle this technology responsibly and we just gotta worry about the children.
In the U.S. I feel like commonly held values are eroding. Now, trusting institutions is naive. Citizen researchers with none of the skills to read past the abstract are a dime a dozen. AI feels like a multiplying factor to these issues. In the hands of most, its a tool for goofs. But in the hands of a few, its a tool for fabricating truth.
Escape Velocity
Previously, I stated I’d give AI a fair shake. I committed to using AI for a year. I’m contemplating cutting that short. I think AI has made me dumber. I’m certainly more dependant on a $20 subscription to do my job and less sure of myself. Perhaps we can have a healthy intermittent fasting culture with AI. I’m not sure.