Human civilization is about 6000 years old. The Internet is almost 40 years old and it is already chewing up and leaving behind human civilization and human nature.
Maybe lightning, and everything that inevitably follows it, was a mistake, allowing information to move at a speed that people aren't ready to handle.
A decade ago, proof-of-concept websites looked ridiculous, or just plain annoying, before they got going.
This was before anyone did. Clone your own voice from its short sampleand then call your bank.
Before a friend starts sending me “his” AI-generated songs that sound like lost radio hits. He's not performing or writing the words or music, but rather providing cues to an artificial intelligence, then tweaking the results to, for example, “make it sound more yacht rock.”
It turns out that passing those pesky captchas, or the fully automated Public Turing Test to tell computers and humans apart, was giving the computers data to pass them too.
The companies that made their fortunes from the Internet are spending untold sums to move faster and disrupt more things, starting with the World Wide Web and perhaps humanity in the process.
The ugly consequence of replacing news results, and everything else, with AI-generated summaries seems painfully obvious to everyone except The geniuses at Google are now doing just that..
The ad company wants to collect your data instead of getting you to click on nydailynews.com or some other website that it doesn't make money from.
Forget about “don't be mean”. The mantra now is “Let Google do the Googling for you.”
What fresh hell is this?
Forget looking elsewhere. The map wants to be the area.
Don't think too much about how Google will keep Googling for you as a reverse flow of artificially generated information that litters the web, and as the search engine grabs the rest of that money. are used to operate news, you know, pay people to report news.
No wonder Google ditched its “Don't Be Evil” slogan on its way to becoming a $2 trillion-and-change behemoth and changed its name, signaling the breadth of its ambitions as well as its It is best to make a name too. Hard to find.
As my colleague Maria Bustillos put it in Flaming Hydra, The parasite kills the host..
OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed startup leader, has just pulled the plug on the unit, which aims to ensure that its sometimes unwieldy technical product, which takes obscene and insane amounts of capital and power to produce He can produce results that allow him to monetize the collective output. Humanity is not, at this point, a long-term threat to the human race.
The company is also “exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to produce NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts.”
Translation: They want to exploit people's sexual desires by stealing their bodies and voices, without their consent and recombining them so that no real people have to pay.
This is end-time stuff, happening right now in real time.
This is not science fiction: AI is automatically writing police reports from officers' body cameras..
Despite its grandiose name, AI isn't intelligence at all but a math game that's anticipating what will happen next: autocorrect on steroids. Given enough data and processing power, though, it can prove a difference without much difference.
AI is already powerful enough to displace and drive out the collective creativity of humans—and it could—so, of course, is the economic utility of our creativity.
Artist and author Molly Crabapple warns that “productive AI art is vampirical, feeding on previous generations of artwork even as it sucks the blood of living artists.” An open letter Way back in 2023.
“AI-art generators are trained on huge datasets, containing millions of copyrighted images, obtained without their creator's knowledge, let alone compensation or consent. These effective methods is the biggest art heist in history, perpetrated by venerable corporate entities backed by Silicon Valley.”
We are beyond that. Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionand in a strange new era of art in the age of algorithmic origins.
But tech people and investors eyeing the hefty payouts now anticipate that someone else will tackle the risks of this brave new world. Or not.
They will continue to eat our seed corn and rest in our water as long as it pays.
Have any of these people ever read a book, or seen a movie? This does not end well.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, host of the FAQ NYC podcast and columnist for the Daily News.