but are the machines really learning tho?

The core A.I. product is the experience of talking to a computer that talks back

The point of A.I. is to talk to a cool computer

This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here. If you use ML to t... See more

Forget Privacy: You're Terrible at Targeting Anyway

Since the generative AIs have been trained on the entirety of human work — most of it mediocre — it produces “wisdom of the crowd”-like results. They may hit the mark but only because they are average.

Noah Smith • Interview: Kevin Kelly, Editor, Author, and Futurist

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