AI Hot Take 🔥
Choose Utopia!
Dystopia - usually with a side order of Apocalypse - that’s the popular choice when it comes to talking about AI or Artificial Intelligence. Doom and gloom and AI taking over the world and the Terminator is coming for you and your job and your children and it's all so silly.
Don’t buy it - choose Utopia! I'm a sucker for utopias and I love it when a utopian vision of the future sneaks into a movie or book. AI is going to play a big role getting humanity closer to Utopia.
Fear
Why does AI trigger so much Dystopian thinking? Because AI is surrounded by Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. A previous employer of mine was accused of using FUD in the tech arena and it remains a popular technique to characterize emerging tech. FUD is an effective way to attack something:
FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information, and is a manifestation of the appeal to fear.
Fear boils down to losing your job and man there is a lot to chew on here - AI is going to take the jobs of artists, writers and programmers oh my! Check out the Pessimists Archive to see how AI is just the latest tech fear trend as well as many other entertaining looks at how humanity tends towards the glass is half empty point of view.
The emergence of AI has been compared to the disruption photography caused in the art world when it was invented in the 1800's. I love photography - I built a B&W darkroom in my parent’s basement when I was a kid and I would putter down there for hours surrounded by trays of chemicals like some mad scientist and it was glorious. Here’s what people thought of photography at the time:
From Charles Baudelaire in 1859, French poet and art critic decrying this new form of artistic expression. This new medium, he said, was “the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies” and to embrace it was a sign of “blindness” and “imbecility.
Artists I see on Instagram have been pushing a #BLEEPaiart hashtag. So, it’s deeply emotional and charged when you're talking about someone's job in the face of imminent change. People get super defensive. One more quote, from my favorite 80s movie - Guido the Killer Pimp from Risky Business getting into it with the entitled Joel (Tom Cruise):
Let me give you a little advice so you know. In times of economic uncertainty, never ever BLEEP with another man's livelihood …
Uncertainty
Uncertainty closely aligns with Understanding. AI appears mystical, magical. Like Arthur C Clarke said
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
AI appeared to burst on the scene to an unsuspecting world with the launch of ChatGPT - just as we were shaking off last Thanksgiving’s Turkey Tryptophan sleepies. ChatGPTs ability to take simple prompts/questions on any subject and serve up comprehensive and (seemingly) authoritative responses captured the imagination of dystopian dreamers everywhere where the rise of thinking machines rule humanity. DALL-E hit mainstream about the same time taking text input and creating pictures like my ‘Utopian City’ at the beginning of this article.
Both ChatGPT and DALL-E fall into a new-ish category termed Generative AI where something - could be text, could be an image - is created from existing information. While Generative AI is relatively new, AI is not. AI is built on a steady progression of math and computer science, tracing it's roots back 80 years. In 1943 the first computer models for neural networks were developed. Neural networks are central to AI in all its variants. So while it may seem like this new amazing thing emerged last Thanksgiving, it didn't and it's not magic - it's a new set of computer programs built atop all the ones that preceded it, doing tasks to help humans out.
Doubt
So … much … doubt. I could fill pages and pages with articles about AI being the end of days, but I’d rather not validate any of it with references. The one cited below I saw in the WSJ over the weekend and that’s when I decided to write about it this week. The Wall Street Frikkin Journal headlining AIs Threat to Humanity … Ridic!
How Worried Should We Be About AI’s Threat to Humanity?
AI is no more a threat to humanity than your toaster. The key for AI - as with any new and powerful tool - is figure out how you can use it. Keep humans in the center managing and developing it and watch out for people, companies and countries (!) from using it to produce bad outcomes.
A fool with a tool is still a fool
What does ChatGPT think?
Gotcha - ChatGPT doesn't think! It just cranks out responses to prompts based on digesting ridiculous amounts of human conversation thank you internet and cloud and phones and see Large Language Models.
Regardless, no article on AI would be complete without running it through ChatGPT to get a response - not surprisingly it did quite well on this subject.
Here's ChatGPT's unedited response to the prompt 'write me a paragraph in a casual, conversational style about the benefits of generative AI:'
Generative AI is pretty darn cool, let me tell you! One of the sweetest things about it is how it can whip up all sorts of content like text, images, or even music, without breaking a sweat. Need a catchy slogan for your new business? Generative AI's got your back. Want to create unique art or generate realistic faces that don't even exist? Yep, it can do that too. Plus, it's like a 24/7 brainstorming buddy that never gets tired. It can churn out ideas, help you with creative projects, and save you heaps of time. So, whether you're a writer, a designer, or just a regular Joe looking to make life a tad easier, generative AI is your tech-savvy sidekick. It's a game-changer, my friend!
Here's ChatGPT's unedited response to the prompt 'write me a paragraph in a casual, conversational style about the dangers of generative AI:'
Generative AI, like the kind we're chatting with right now, is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it's pretty mind-blowing how it can whip up text or art that looks convincingly human-made. But on the flip side, there are some real dangers lurking in the shadows. Think misinformation on steroids. These AI systems can be easily manipulated to churn out fake news, deceptive reviews, or even deepfake content that blurs the line between reality and fiction. Plus, there's the whole privacy thing. The more these AI systems learn from our online footprints, the more they can predict, which can feel a little too much like having an overly nosy neighbor. So, while generative AI has its cool and creative uses, we've got to be cautious about how it's used and make sure we're not opening Pandora's digital box.
What’s it to you?
For individuals and small business keep your eyes out for how AI tech can help you be more. More creative, more productive - doing more of what you started your business to do in the first place. AI is already in our phones doing a better job with voice recognition and image search for example. It's starting to pop up augmenting existing tools. For example, WordPress has an AI plugin that will suggest text for a webpage that’s context aware. Say you're selling stuff on your site and you need some starter descriptions for your inventory. Canva uses it when you're creating a design - suggesting alternative layouts and colors for you to choose from. Much more is coming.
I'll write more on this topic but if you're interested broadly this is a really nice read from Marc Andreesen on How AI Will Save The World
btw Marc Andreesen created the first popular web browser Netscape and that’s when I fell in love with the Internet 💖