There’s a lot of people with big feelings around artificial intelligence (AI) due to the recent launches of products such as Chat GPT, Google’s Bard, OpenAI, and DALL-E, and for a very good reason (which I’ll get into another time).

The Myth

TL;DR: artificial intelligence can take a short prompt and produce new work.

Some people believe that Chat GPT and Bard can accept a short prompt and then generate paragraphs of new content, that self-driving vehicles are fully automated where human drivers can take their hands off the steering wheel, or that the AI generated images are brand new works of art.

The (Hyped) Concern

TL;DR: this will replace humans! People will lose their jobs to robots!

We’ve already seen less people employed at fast food restaurants due to online ordering and digital kiosks installed at locations. We’ve also seen less people working the cash registers at grocery stories and replaced with self-serving checkouts. It’s only a matter of time before we’re replacing writers and programmers too!

The Reality

TL;DR: Artificial Intelligence, as companies are using it today, is false advertising. It’s a buzzword intended to confuse you, to intentionally make you associate the science-fi version of AI (like SkyNet from the 1980’s movie The Terminator or VIKI, Sonny, and the other robots from the 2004 movie I, Robot) instead of what it really is: a pattern imitation tool.

What AI Can Do

These tools are great if they’re used correctly, as in, processing input by asking it to identify a specific pattern and then return it in a specific way. This is great for summarizing large amounts of text, combining content, and optimizing code. AI, as we currently know it, is advanced machine learning and can be a great tool for accessibility like automatically condensing articles into key points for those who find walls of text challenging to read, converting audio files into written transcripts (but would still need to be edited because it’s not always accurate), or generating image descriptions for people who rely on screen-readers or simply can’t view the image.

What AI Can’t Do

At best, it produces funny and silly stuff for entertainment. At worst, it gets people killed. People have died because drivers trusted Tesla’s autopilot beyond its capabilities. AI is also getting people (either knowingly or accidentally) to violate copyright laws and circulate misinformation. It’s also giving spammers a better ROI.

Point being, this tool can not create anything new. It also cannot tell the difference between fact and opinion. It doesn’t have lived experience like a real human, so that context is completely lost.

The (Real) Concern

Artists, writers, and more are suing because companies are using their work to train their AI models without their consent and without payment. Therefore their work, because it’s an imitation tool, is being illegally modified and marketed as someone else’s name.

While it can be helpful in digital marketing to use it to write an SEO description based on the article’s content, it can write inaccurate and even made-up information if asked to write a whole article based on the description. It’s the same as if you just used your phone’s text-predictor when texting: a nonsensical word salad.

The Conclusion

Companies make money from hype, so they’re either selling you on the idea of fear (the hyped concern) or a sci-fi fantasy. Technology is not there yet, and apparently, neither are ethics.

Sources

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Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere https://bloom.bg/3U5mZKH

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