I can see some minor benefits - I use it for the odd bit of mundane writing and some of the image creation stuff is interesting, and I knew that a lot of people use it for coding etc - but mostly it seems to be about making more cash for corporations and stuffing the internet with bots and fake content. Am I missing something here? Are there any genuine benefits?
Don’t discount the generative AI either!
Language generating AI like LLMs: Though we’re in early stages yet and they don’t really work for communication, these are going to be the foundation on which AI learns to talk and communicate information to people. Right now they just spit out correct-sounding responses, but eventually the trick to using that language generation to actually communicate will be resolved.
Image/video/music generating AI: How difficult it is right now, for the average person to illustrate an idea or visual concept they have! But already these image generating AI are making such illustration available to the common person. As they advance further and adjusting their output based on natural conversational language becomes more effective, this will only get better. A picture paints a thousand words…and now the inverse will also be true, as anyone will be able to create a picture with sufficient description. And the same applies to video and music.
That said I love your managing production point. It’s something I e been thinking too - centrally planned economies have always had serious issues, but if with predictive AI we can overcome the problems by accurately predicting future need, the problems with them may be solvable, and we can then take advantage of the inherent efficiency in such a planned system.
That’s funny because the whole post was sarcastically outlining a distopian nightmare.
If that kind of stuff was actually to become real, some dictator would take control of it and subjugate the entire country, or world… forever. There’d be no way to resist that level of surveillance or machine policing.
I think each one of those dystopian ideas can be done in a safe and humane way, but needless to say it is not the current trajectory.