The Myth of Artificial Intelligence

I am more inclined to the argument that artificial intelligence is, rather than an imaginative agent, part of a lineage of cultural technologies that have allowed us to encode and access the intelligence of other humans across generations, just as internet search and libraries and print and the writing system have, just as language itself has.

With big technology companies working hard to get us to use — and trust — their products, they have an interest in rhetoric that makes their products come across as not just human-like but as human-like in ways that support our goals; they’re leaning into this particularly hard with AI models that generate language. To call big technology companies... See more