I wish we had more people writing more sophisticated concerns about the harms of AI.
"Slop" criticism is important because I think many of us feel we are being gaslit into believing that generative AI is currently creating quality creative output, while Al (henceforth Alfred) is overwhelmingly creating mediocre quality creative work.
Every past winter, Alfred survives in a more focused and refined form. Eliza was a toy chatbot of the 1960s, but what emerged from that is expanded investment in things like Natural Language Processing and Markov chains.
Markov chains have always been powerful, but through computing applications, Markov chains led to advancing capabilities in weather prediction, financial modeling, and eventually Google PageRank and bioinformatics/biostatistics (BLOSUM/BLAST for analyzing/predicting/correlating amino acid chain similarities).
The next boom and winter led Alfred to popularize classic machine learning into practical applications in consumer products: recommendation engines and clustering algorithms that formed the core of products from the Netflix prize to Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, and eventually virtually every consumer retailer has multiple machine learning products supporting everything from suggested products to search results to their own logistics and sales and financial modeling.
Learn from the past. Prepare for the future. Al will learn how to spell strawberry, write basic documents and code more effectively, and make fewer basic mistakes. Think beyond that. What are the emerging harms that come AFTER all of that?
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #generative_ai_risks #generative_ai_concerns