But what really blows my noodle is how rare AI skepticism still is in the media. One year ago, ChatGPT was opened to the public. The onslaught of overheated and careless rhetoric about our imminent ascent to a new plane of existence (or our imminent extermination) began then and has not slowed since. It’s inherent to the financial interests of journalism for professional media to sensationalize, after all. (This is a complaint that’s old enough that it was made by Charles Dickens, among many other journalists.) And so I’m not at all surprised that there’s been so many stories about how nothing will ever be the same, even as we’re all still just living busy little ordinary lives like we always have.

Freddie deBoer • Where Are the AI Skepticism Stories?

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In its desperate hunger for clicks, much of the media has decided to endorse a maximalist interpretation of what AI might do. I’ve cataloged them before: disrupt every industry, eliminate poverty and need, send us off of into the stars, end death. Or, alternatively, threaten everything we’ve built, provoke dystopia, exterminate humanity. Take your ... See more

Our Dystopian AI Future Isn't Skynet. It's a "For You" Algorithm Stomping on a Human Face Forever

phoebe added

I’m not scared of AI or hopeful. I don’t think those words really matter: it’s like asking whether it made sense to be scared or hopeful about the printing press, or the first written alphabet. Humans continually invent things that are immediately beyond their control, and we are doing so again. The world those inventions bring about is something

Ray Nayler • Ray Nayler: Don't Be Afraid of Your Own Depth

sari added

That’s not to say that Hype doesn’t impact public perception of science experiments. AI was famously always “ten years away” and “just linear regressions with a fancy name”... until it wasn’t. But AI’s success didn’t depend on getting a lot of people to use not-yet-good-enough chatbots; it depended on keeping a relatively small number of nerds exci... See more

Packy McCormick • Social vs. Science Experiments

Keely Adler added

While I personally wouldn’t go so far as to describe current LLMs as “a solution in search of a problem” like cryptocurrency has famously been described as, I do think the description rings true in an overall economic/business sense so far. Was there really a great crying need for new ways to cheat on academic essays? Probably not. Will chatting wi... See more

andrea added

this is a valuable perspective on how disruptive AI actually is

In the course of a year, the tech industry’s dreary post-social, post-crypto interregnum was rapidly supplanted — largely as the result of public-facing efforts by OpenAI, which is reportedly in talks with Microsoft about a potential $10 billion investment — by a story about inevitable technologies that are so transformat

John Herrman • Why Artificial Intelligence Often Feels Like Magic

Isabelle Levent added

What is upsetting about so much of the commentary and hype around ChatGPT is that it ignores the fact of writing and reading as experiences . To some, as long as ChatGPT generates content that is plausible, passing a (very) surface-level muster, we should be impressed and allow it to substitute for the human-produced text.

John Warner • Speed and Efficiency are not Human Values

sari added

A less cynical way to think about the postmodern tech revolution is that it hasn’t completely subsumed the real, brilliant, chaotic world, but merely emphasized it as vital and precious. Artificial intelligence, in my view, continues this tradition. The only singularity it can truly achieve is one that understands humanity at its most inhuman (and ... See more

Haley Nahman • #138: Do you pass the Turing test?

Britt Gage and added

ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think

Ian Bogost theatlantic.com

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