the price of convenience

Generative AI, says film-maker and writer Justine Bateman, “is one of the worst ideas society has ever come up with”. She says she despises how it incapacitates us. “They’re trying to convince people they can’t do the things they’ve been doing easily for years – to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime ... See more

“The AI enthusiasts say, ‘Don’t worry, eventually nobody will need to know anything.’ I don’t subscribe to that.”

“But maybe the first one is that I’m not interested in reading something that nobody wrote,” she says. “I read because I want to understand how somebody sees something, and there’s no ‘somebody’ inside the synthetic text-extruding machines.” It’s just a papier-mache made from lots of different people’s words, she says.

Does she feel she is being “le... See more