the impact of AI

I don’t talk about it much but I do work at Google and I just want to contribute, as a small addendum to the wider conversation about AI, and how much it sucks, and how stupid it is, and how if you make garlic oil like it tells you to you will give botulism to your entire family -

we don’t use it.

like internally. we don’t use it.

I mean that we don’... See more

AI image generation is essentially a truncated exercise in taste; a product of knowing which inputs and keywords to feed the image-mashup machine, and the eye to identify which outputs contain any semblance of artistry. All that is to say: AI itself can’t generate good taste for you.

There’s a difference between an AI agent and an AI copilot . Language matters. The latter implies more of human augmentation, rather than human obfuscation. I imagine copilots and augmentation will be more palatable to people. (This will be especially true as we adjust to the reality of software doing work for us .)

datafied understanding

Artificial Intelligence is not going to make this any better. New research suggests that AI is reducing complexity, or at least our experience of it. A recent study, The Platonic Representation Hypothesis , shows that as AI models become more powerful, they form increasingly similar statistical representations of the world. The result is that we ar... See more

We are familiar with A.I. helpers, like Apple’s Siri, which are modeled after feminine stereotypes, but here it feels as if the opposite is happening: A mother has been recast as a robotic being, her work dismissed as rote and easily outsourced.

I’ve struggled with this balance myself. When the audience responds to something I’ve written, it can be tempting to chase the revenue and viewership by repeating the format. Repeatability and audience fervor can build a business, but kill the artist.

If you serve as a mechanical slave to mass media and online algorithms, you’ll end up with intellectual diabetes. To find quality information, you have to rebel against the incentives of mass media and the algorithms that threaten its business model.Make no mistake. For the conscious news consumer, there has never been a better time to be alive. Th... See more

It would be uncomfortable to remove me entirely from the workflow. I might feel lazy, guilty, even nervous about it. Did the bot book the right flight? Does it know I prefer morning flights, hate red eyes, and am a loyal Delta SkyMiles member? A better path would be the chatbot saying, “Sure Rex, here are three options for you to choose from.” I fe... See more