Generative AI is just productivity software

For decades now, software tools have promised to make working life easier. But on one critical dimension — their ability to improve our thinking — they don’t seem to be making much progress at all.

Meanwhile, the arrival of generative artificial intelligence could make the tools we use more powerful than ever — or they could turn out to be just ano... See more

This is one of the many reasons why I find the current conversation about so-called generative AI so immensely frustrating: there’s all this hype about making everything easier and faster, about how we can eliminate all the work involved in the making of words and images. But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is ... See more

Some may worry about whether powerful new neural-network models for generating text and images will replace workers and artists. But this can be true only if beauty and creativity are measurable by one-dimensional metrics, if art and human endeavors are static forms whose rules and objectives do not change, if we reject the possibility of meaning a... See more

The incident once again highlights a common problem with all generative AI tools: whether it’s AI-generated images, music, or writing, these works are inherently derivative because anything they produce is made up of remixed pieces of work in the training data.