@beachthorncombe
My fear regarding AI is far more pragmatic and scary than the bubble gum hyperbole that most folk are distracted by in news feeds and TV interviews.
So what is my fear?
The fact that, already, over a billion people, (including most Fortune 500 companies), use the technology every day without appreciating that it remains little more than a glorified 1970’s Casio calculator that simply does for words what that 50 year old calculator technology did for numbers.
It pattern matches, it guesses, it joins the dots and offers an illusion of intelligence that, even when hallucinating or deceitfully filling in the blanks, most of you people accept as if you were being given genuine answers or solutions.
And there’s the problem right there because, even without the sci-fi scenarios the tech bros are now admitting, (probably to stall the reality that AI is not going to be the AGI God they once promised), AI is already acting like malware for the whole of human culture as Homo Sapiens lazily allow it to replace their own human creativity.
The very essence of being human is being replaced by machines creating their own underwhelming solutions for us; solutions that work ‘by committee’, knocking off all the peaks and dips of the extra-ordinary to give us flattened underwhelming answers to our problems.
Just saying, we don’t need AI taking over our internet or manifesting our next global pandemic when, already, we humans are passing the baton of our own raw energies and passions to non living digital representations of a human spirit we have already seeded to such technology. (AI slop fills Spotify and Youtube these days).
And I’m no Luddite. I mean, I trained my own offline AI on 40 years of my own digital footprint and created a fabulous digital mind based upon my own life BUT that doesn’t stop it creating fiction when I ask it to recall details of hundreds of my own anecdotes, projects, patents and prose.
In fact, because I was working with a lifetime of my own memories, the ‘deceitful’ LLM AI’s output stood out like a shining beacon each time it tried to fill in things it didn’t know!
Just remember. These AI tech people are promising a cure for cancer when, in reality, even 4 years since the ChatGPT revelation first surprised the world, they can’t even stop their creations from hallucinating!
And talking of hallucinating a bit further.
Guess what? Until recently, (before Google’s NoteBook LM bolted on the lying, deceitful Gemini AI LLM to that fantastic AI tool and renamed it Gemini Notebook), it used to be able to interrogate millions of tokens of a user’s personal data in a kind of walled off sandbox where hallucinating was massively curtailed … and then … despite Notebook LM having advertised that amazing feature as its magical killer app, the arrival of Gemini AI into Notebook LM brought hallucinating right into that previously near perfect AI utility and, overnight, Notebook LM , (now Gemini Notebook), turned from an incredibly useful and trustworthy AI utility into a piece of trash I rarely use anymore. 🙁
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