In this news:
I am, famously, not averse to making this issue all about myself. I’ve written about the dozens of AI clones of my own book available on Amazon — one of which I even bought so I could probe it for hidden meanings. I was the first journalist to publish a thorough digest of the AI-ridden script for the disastrousGlasgow Wonka event in January of last year. More startling still was the reaction to a (relatively mild) piece on AI’s deleterious affects on social media last February which, five hours later, resulted in my X account being nuked by the world’s most famous free speech absolutist — an event later addressed in an Oireachtas meeting with X executives.
It won’t be news to anyone who knows me, or who reads this column with any regularity, that I hate AI Hype. I specify “Hype” because, obviously, there are areas of AI that show promise, and it would be churlish for anyone to claim otherwise.
For everyday people, the basic functions provided by large language models for assembling and editing unwieldy documents or making short work of rote and time-consuming tasks is a real boon. I may not think that these kinds of features — “spicy autocomplete” being my favourite description — are the magical, earth-shattering revelations that Big AI wants us to think they are, but I welcome anything that removes some of the tedious admin that takes people away from their work or passions.
Its use-cases for pattern recognition in science, medicine and linguistics are exciting, and could become more exciting still. And, if you simply appreciate it as a fun little thing to play around with or chat nonsense to, I have no issue with that either.
By AI Hype, however, I mean the opposite. I mean the forward-facing view of AI that rejects these limited, unsexy applications, in favour of literally everything else. The sort of AI that is presented in blustering paeans from every tech conference CEO; every breathless news article that posits it as the answer to all of life’s problems; every asinine commitment from a politician, promising to incorporate it into each of our everyday lives and every sector of our economy, because otherwise “we’ll fall behind”.
All of which leads to a reality where 72,000 companies worldwide now claim to specialise in machine learning, and 82% of all companies say they’re making inroads in AI optimisation.
I hate all of this in almost every way a thing can be hated. I hate the factless waffle that surrounds Big AI’s every improbable goal. I hate how insipidly stupid, or just plain evil, those goals so often are, and the yawning chasm between them and any form of achievable reality. I hate that Big AI’s successes are inflated and its failures ignored — or are even categorised as hilarious mis-steps, like when AI chatbots tell people to eat poisonous mushrooms, put glue on pizza, or make air diffusers from chlorine gas.
I hate that Big AI consumes so much energy that every time you generate a six-fingered portrait of Anne Frank or a scene from the Vietnam war in the style of Studio Ghibli, you might as well just kill a polar bear with a crossbow. I hate that it can run roughshod over every copyright law and environmental protection on the planet in pursuit of the data it needs to continue failing, with no consequences save for the enrichment of the worst people on Earth, who have managed to make all of this magical bullshit seem sensible to an intellectual class comprised of people I wouldn’t trust to print an email.
And, yes, I hate what Big AI means for culture. I hate that writers and artists must suffer the indignity of being pickpocketed by the richest men who’ve ever lived. I hate the constant, deadening marketing of machine-generated slop as a replacement for human thought and creativity. I hate every shiny, godawful image from an “AI artist”, and each lifeless line of pilfered prose, Frankensteined into existence by an “AI author”, posited as a substitute for illustrators and writers facing pay and working conditions already decimated by assaults on their professions from those self-same Silicon Valley hordes.
For decades now, tech founders have recognised the knowledge gap between themselves and everyone else; their investors, the media, world governments, and the public at large. In that sense, AI was the perfect pitch at the perfect time.
Some years ago, I hoped our recent experiences of speculative tech bubbles for blockchain, crypto, and NFTs, would serve as cautionary tales, warnings to be heeded and learned from. They were not. It turns out they were intelligence tests. And tests that we all, collectively, failed. If we continue to let Silicon Valley’s AI hype machine dictate our lives, our headlines, our politics, and our culture, then more fool us.
Increasingly, I find AI’s failure to approach the intelligence of a human being more alarming than ever. Because, from where I’m looking, we don’t look that smart at all.
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