Entry #8 - The Future is Now, Old Man

     Growing up, my generation was inundated with a fantastical concept of AI. That went doubly so for anyone who partook of nerd culture, such as myself. The evil, human hunting Skynet; the well intentioned, but ultimately flawed, VIKI; the complicated and morally ambiguous Geth; and the sinister GLaDOS. The image of AI planted in my head was always one of complexity, intelligence and intention. Even from a more grounded and scientific approach, a true AI would be a mind capable of thought and reason.

    However, much like the iteration of the "hover board", the AI first released to the public in 2022 isn't quite meeting my expectations. Which might be for the best since the list of examples that first jumped to mind were mostly villains. That isn't to say it doesn't achieve impressive results. On the contrary, many of the abilities displayed have seemed amazing. The chatting feature is almost like talking to a person. The information summaries are detailed and well organized. The art is on demand, albeit soulless. The videos are....fever dreams. On the surface, these seem really interesting and promising. But when we scratch a little deeper, the paint might be covering some rust.

    Ask an a chatbot a question, and you'll often receive an answer. Even when the AI doesn't know the answer. According to a study published in Columbia Journalism Review, chatbots returned incorrect information at a staggering rate.

"Overall, the chatbots often failed to retrieve the correct articles. Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly."

    While the efficacy of AI as a general information retrieval tool is certainly in question, there are a slew of other concerns as well. Companies use information, art, code, etc. created by other people to train their bots, and then profit from them. If pirating a movie is theft to America, then what would this be called? Online content has become a mess, and generated slop art has ruined apps like Pinterest. Propaganda bots infest social media. Some students are learning to lean on AI as a crutch, missing out on important opportunities to triumph over challenges. Worst of all, a lot of the promises that AI companies seem to be making involve automating people out their jobs.  

    Do I think AI was a mistake and shouldn't have been created in it's current iteration? Of course not. Is this all just a case of 'old man yells at sky'? Very likely. Just like all new technology, there are going to be great positives, and terrible negatives. There are a lot of really incredible opportunities with AI. Scientific research, medical applications, robotics, data analysis. The list goes on and on. If it deals with digital information, AI likely has an interesting application. 

    Ultimately, I believe generative AI is a really incredible breakthrough that has been somewhat soured by the rush to profit off of it. And I suppose that is something I'll just have to get over.