AI is often hailed (by me, no less!) as a powerful tool for augmenting human intelligence and creativity. But what if relying on AI actually makes ...
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I completely agree with both of these claims.
I have mixed feelings about AI becoming mainstream since it is a very powerful tool (as you say). But I cannot ignore its obvious red flags and downsides. Downsides we are already experiencing today, but they aren't getting their required attention (probably because stakeholders don't like to hear about the downsides or ill-effects of their very profitable products).
I, myself have written a few articles about the obvious downsides of AI from different perspectives. Knowledge collapse is just another grave danger (no less) we should be aware of.
Have a read if you are interested:
AI, but at what cost? The energy-inefficient AI era is already here
The importance of cash in a technological society
This is very true. Unfortunately, I think AI will be the end of creativity. I want to believe we will always have the "fringe minority" who will strive to destroy the common boundaries and explore beyond. But they will be harder and harder to find.
Think about why humans do what they do, think about fields that improve our very being (soul, or spirit if you'd like). Art, music, writing, philosophy - where do they get their value from?
If they were easy to do - would they still be valuable?
If their creation did not involve pain and endless hours of practice and experience - would they still be valuable?
These will matter less and less with time. If we are able to create a visual masterpiece with a simple prompt or generate a song that sounds musically amazing, without having to actually know how to write music - it will lose its humane value.
This simple fact, along with the rise in AI popularity and the combined ignorance of everybody involved (forgive me for being harsh, this is a serious topic in my opinion), will eventually run humanity down to very dark places I don't want to imagine.
Good concern bro, but to me i think it will instead boost creativity with more time to come
just now #a friend of mine is conducting a research project he calls plastecity how plastic materials can make electricity and conduct it well like in metals
When i try to ask an AI that can plastic materials conduct electricity , it will tell me by default that its impossible
based on the facts i has but due to human desire and ambition , just a dream can be put in place
Just dont be worried but keep thinking outside the box,
I would love to see how plastic can conduct electricity, please send your friend's research!
alright, lets just give it some good time, but his latest insights is "it may not be the same electricity we know, but a different form of energy"
i agree that's what is meant to be abuse of it is a negative human error.
I guess it's a "standing on the shoulders of giants" argument for me, if massive amounts of knowledge are black-boxed and easy to use then it gives the potential to build on that and innovate on the fringes. If you can't innovate because you don't understand the basic principles then it would create an issue.
It does feel like a moment of societal revolution, with much more capabilities in the hands of more people, but also potentially a changing of social status and a "globalisation" of thought.
Maths used to be about abacuses and times tables. Those skills are lost or reducing because they are irrelevant to solving problems today.
If I can tell my stories in 2035 using Sora V10.5, in a way that looks like a Hollywood blockbuster, then success will be about the story and not the budget required to create it - that feels like an avenue to great creative expression.
Even if AI in the future was itself creative, I'm not sure that's even a problem, creativity isn't a hierarchy - things touch people or they don't. If every technical challenge is solved by AI; if every physical job is done by a robot; humanity can still have purpose and that purpose won't be about buying enough food to eat, or paying the rent. Now that has extreme societal change written all over it.
"If I can tell my stories in 2035 using Sora V10.5, in a way that looks like a Hollywood blockbuster, then success will be about the story and not the budget required to create it - that feels like an avenue to great creative expression." - This right here is a very good point!
Exactly, apart from the problem solving and the technical challenges, you have forgotten the SM. Imagine that maybe one day all posting and tweeting will be done by AI and people will finally talk to each other again. I can't say that would be a loss.
I appreciate the argument for education, but hear me out: If a person already has access to state-of-the-art educational AI technologies, doesn't that imply that they have access to the rest of the Internet? And if so, they have access to what is, in my opinion, a much better source of information than AI. Thus, I would argue that AI does not lower the barriers to education, and it instead makes it easier to receive a more skewed education.
Also, I'm not just concerned about knowledge collapse, but I'm also concerned about the homogenization of our culture. You mentioned Reddit, which is a perfect example, but there are many other platforms that "force" their users to conform to a specific design, ideology, or something else. I don't think this is entirely AI driven, but I think that AI has shed a good deal of light on it.
The VC "community" has already shown us what happens in a kind of capital collapse where funding is often directed to support existing entities rather than to enable new ones to be developed. So I suspect it would be something like that, only amplifying it further.
I read something a few days ago that made me thinking:
And I am not 100% innocent here, as I even have written a plugin for WordPress that drafts posts for you automatically using AI, but it's hard to see how much we don't fully understand AI and how to use it for better. If I need to ask an AI to write a comment on a LinkedIn post, I shouldn't even be commenting, as I have nothing to say.
Maybe when the hype settles down and we start seeing startups falling apart, AI will have better usage. For now, it's something like blogs and twitter where in 2006, "great, but I do with it?"
I’m not personally worried. As things get skewed and homogenized it will just trigger a deep inner urge to strike out and touch something real.
The internet today has already shown how this will play out with AI to some degree. The internet used to be a much more creative place! You used to “stumble upon” strange and interesting websites. Why? Because the cost of creating that content was much higher, and fewer people had an interest in crossing those technical barriers. You could say the internet was indeed “fringe.”
Now we have a homogenous internet gobbled up by mega corps in the same way strip malls have strip mined our town squares.
BUT, we have never been more connected and more in touch with global happenings. We have never been in deeper global contact.
I see the pendulum swinging back toward authentic self expression, toward diving head first into intimate contact with the real world
Society does not need AI to kill unorthodox ideas, that's exactly why it's called orthodox. In the middle ages, they burned the witches. In Islamic states, they kill the sinners. Same principle, only difference: in our brave new world, we tend to overestimate our degrees of freedom.
Great post and great questions raised,I'm one of those that believes AI can in some form stump knowledge and the ability to think creatively towards solutions.But considering that having both AI and the Internet are great learning tools with wide sources of information I believe I all comes down to the individual.Will they simply copy paste and get an answer? Or will they chat back and forth about how and why the solution came to be? As someone who studies code I find that learning 'how to learn' is one of the things that will determine if you can be successful or just stubborn.Are you training your brain to get answers or are you training to solve problems?
Without that mindset people may simply use AI without even thinking of what consequences it could have. There is to much of a good thing sometimes I suppose
Thanks for this one. This is one of my concerns about wide use of generative AI - especially if going unchecked.
Complete non-expert here 😄, just passionate about nurturing creativity - I can think of a few reasons this can go wrong:
So we're dealing with human nature, which is really the same problem we're always dealing with as technology and societies advance. And let's remember that we also love novelty and to feel useful, so there's a natural counter-side too.
I like to think we can counter potential pitfalls (the type in the article) of widely adopted generative AI by creating tools which encourage creativity, curiosity and critical thinking. These are qualities we're going to need to adapt well to a changing world, so we should take care to preserve and grow them more than ever before.