AI Fearmongering
I am surrounded by local news this week. Awash in it. Unable to beat back against the shores or however that goes. I’ve learned that gas prices have decreased recently but that some experts agree prices may go up at some point in the next five months, but it’s too soon to say really and we’ll check in on the story as it develops at 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 11 tonight.
Also, I’m pretty surprised that there’s such a push to make people worried that AI chatbots are going to make work, school, and society obsolete. As someone who has played with them for a long time, including on this site, I think they’re interesting, and it’s fun to see new bots with new triggers and behaviors, but somehow they still feel the same underneath.
I have this idea that most of the time when someone proclaims a new movie to be the best or worst thing ever made, they probably just don’t watch that many movies. They don’t have a lot to compare it to. With the AI-generated items, they’re just not used to looking at that kind of thing. All of those images of people with weird hands and dozens of fingers? And the way certain bots somehow look ugly in the same way? The writing is like that too.
Kids using AI to get out of writing school essays are going to make a new kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma. Maybe if only one of them does it, it might be hard to spot. If the teacher is in a rush. And doesn’t notice how totally different the student sounds all of a sudden.
Not to say that you can’t do entertaining things with a bot:
I mean, I think it’s funny to teach a bot to constantly mention that it went to Harvard while you talk to it, but it’s like playing one of those games with a branching narrative where you have a delightful and personalized experience and enjoy it so much you decide to play again, only to discover you weren’t really making that many choices.
You know, having heard fifteen more local news updates about the scary AI, maybe it’s the local news writers who are right to be worried about bots taking their jobs.