Patrick Galey says exactly what I think about ‘AI’:
We’ve reached a point where the belief in Gen AI’s inevitability must be treated as an article of faith, a pseudo-religious belief system founded upon impossible-to-prove claims made by highly unobjective people. This would be merely weird, were businesses and governments not putting all their eggs in this extremely dubious basket, and were investors not saddling enterprises with dangerously onerous debts just so they can get a vague, future-shaped piece of the pie.
There have been attempts to rationalise this obsession by outside observers, by either buying into the hype a little bit and assuming chasing its promises is rational behaviour therefore, or by assuming there are hidden reasons behind the mania. The most common reason given being the idea that AI can replace and deskill workers and therefore discipline an (IT) work force that had gotten a little bit of power over its employers. If anybody can program using an AI you don’t need expensive programmers anymore. (On that note, it’s no coincidence that a lot of AI cheerleaders tend to be in the more meta parts of IT: scrum masters, architects, tech gurus, people who don’t actually test or develop that much themselves…). All of this would make sense had we not just been through similar, if smaller manias the same people bought into: first crypto and then NFT. The blockchain was going to revolutionise business as well.
Patrick’s essay is mostly about the impossibility of the AI dream, but here he briefly touches upon something else that vexes me enormously about the AI hype:
I see the argument that the Gen AI fetish taking over the world is no more than the logical end point of the “pet rock” economy, a feature of late-stage capitalism where content is the opiate of the masses, content that doesn’t have to be original, or true, or even especially good, so long as it may be consumed.
I think he means it more in terms of CEOs chasing market fads rather than ordinary people looking for entertainment, but that view of content as an endless through of slop for us to eagerly lap up is something that was already omnipresent in the media and AI has only accelerated that process. From a producer’s point of view, that AI makes it so much easier to ‘create’ a book or a picture or a movie is great, but who wants to read something that wasn’t written, just generated?
There are more good movies and anime than I can watch in my lifetime, more books to be read than you can finish in a century, more music made every day that would take you decades to catch up to: you do not need the fire hose of generated content. The only way normal people consume AI content is if they’re cheated in doing so. Again, it’s in a producer’s interest to do so of course. Spotify doesn’t have to pay even its too low royalties on AI music it generates itself, but if people really wanted that, they could’ve generated it themselves. Why pay Spotify if the AI music you yourself generate promises to perfectly match your tastes?
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