Freddie deBoer • Where Are the AI Skepticism Stories?
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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.
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Although, as we saw with electrification, optimism is a natural response to the arrival of a powerful and mysterious new technology, it can blind us to more troubling portents. “The simple faith in progress,” wrote Norbert Wiener, one of the great theoreticians of information processing, “is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging
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