I've been seeing a TON of "fictional bands" (in the description box) after listening to "[Full Album] (70s Psychedelic Rock)" -- I can tell, but unfortunately, 90% of the comments are so positive, but it's because new music stinks and they are grading it on a curve... Hundreds of thousands of views.
When you've had the great open mics, I look and compare the view count before/after, and people don't seem to give anything a chance (maybe too many letdowns?).. I look at my statistics/analytics, and a majority stop listening by the 30 second mark - not even giving a chance to let the song start.
I'm a musician and I'm too old to do anything else. But I will not go down that AI path. I use microphones and real instruments.
It was already hard enough to break through the surfeit of new music in our current digitized era of diminishing returns - about once a year or so I collect my assorted streaming royalties and buy something off the dollar menu - but AI-generated music just piles on the problem. I’m about to start going out to play bars again, where people can see me as an older guy with an acoustic guitar - and maybe I’ll record another album with one voice, one guitar and one mic so I can sell physical copies.
Yesterday a video in one of my feeds popped up showing a healthy Bruce Willis talking about his recovery with the help of Dr. Sanjay Gupta from CNN developing a new miracle potion which sounded ridiculous. Bruce Willis sounded and looked like himself, so did the doctor!
Of course, I was able to google it and see other videos of the doctor talking about Willis' very sad dementia and was educated to know that these deep fakes exists and put the two together, but if more nefarious actors were involved or if google had become overrun by these videos hiding the originals, or worse if a google Gemini AI search just served up the fake video, things could go very badly.
In the age of artificial intelligence, we must lean into authentic humanity. Let’s rebuild high-trust society from the ground up. Check in on people who are isolated so they don't get one-shotted by AI.
Ted: As usual, you have discerned the difficulties in the present cultural milieu. A couple of thoughts: If scarcity of trust is increasing, the cost of creating and sustaining trust will also rise. You accurately state that we need impregnable (a "pregnant" word if there ever was one) sources of information. And you hypothesize the need for persons who are custodians of truth. This brought to mind the concept of "Fair Witness" in Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," so maybe scifi authors intuited this development. And finally, if trust is scarce, so is the lingua franca for developing trust: attention. More than ever we must cultivate the capacity for sustained attention. The problem: what should we pay attention to?
Personally I don't think it's such a terrible thing for us to mistrust information sources. All accounts, whether they are from the news or from other people, have always been biased or inaccurate, whether innocently or manipulatively. When we unthinking trust our news sources, we get polarization (right wing people believing right wing need sources, left wing believing left wing sources) and dogmatism (different religions interpreting religious texts to further their own agendas). Bring open to what we hear without believing it lets us navigate the world with self responsibly instead of outsourcing truth to other people. There is a lot to be said to paying attention with our eyes and ears to the world around us, rather than simply getting information about the world from other people's narratives. Healthy skepticism is not a bad thing. I don't disagree with your concerns or the evidence you cite to support them, I simply see another angle to trust that offers something potentially positive.
Most people don’t have the resources (critical thinking, media access, time, education) to see through elaborate fakes and manipulation. Ted Gioia readers - while affected - are not the main problem here. But even today people with voting rights live in information silos and don’t care much or are not able to see that they are played. This will get much worse.
Has this not always been the case? I remember 20-30 years ago, most people were just as uninformed as they are now. The difference is they didnt make that their whole identity.
There has *always* been a vast flock of sheep. Thats part of humanity, those that want to be told what to think. Harnessing the power of that flock has been the work of "leaders" since time immemorial. What we're witnessing now is just them getting better at it, the next evolution in the grand manipulation that brought us nazi germany, the catholic church, those assholes that built the pyramids, etc etc ETC.
Interesting. Essentially you are asking - what is the truth? There are facts that can be proven (rational). Then there are stories and opinions (emotional). The greatest risk is we lose sight of what we know to be true through solid evidence. The rise of the anti-vaxx movement is an excellent example of what happens when people get swept up in emotional causes, ignoring rational facts and arguments. The rise of the ill-informed influencer who uses emotional arguments to win fame and earn money is another.
Yes, but ... if you have no reason to mistrust information sources, then empty, groundless skepticism is not rational. It's madness. The world is very complicated; we're learning more about it every day. We can't know everything. We have to trust experts and we have to trust social institutions. Up to a point, of course. Case in point -- if you don't trust your doctor's advice, you can get a second opinion -- from a doctor. Not a neighbor, not somebody on television. That would be the sort of madness that Ted is writing about.
"if you have no reason to mistrust information sources, then empty, groundless skepticism is not rational. It's madness."
On the contrary, one has every reason -- today, in the US, if not the West -- to be quite tentative, if not skeptical, of anyone one doesn't know, and of anything one doesn't know. For example, I don't know what kind of world you live in, but it is clearly insulated from some dangerous modern realities.
"We have to trust experts and we have to trust social institutions. Up to a point, of course."
Modern life *forces* to trust "experts", but that says nothing supporting their trustworthiness. You believe you have defined what is rational "up to a point", but one never knows the true limits. Sometimes these "experts" are self-declared and are narcissists; sometimes they did little beyond ferally climbing a ladder to power; sometimes they thoroughly corrupted by money and other life constraints, wittingly, or not ("It is difficult to get a man to understand [or claim] something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"); etc.
"We can't know everything."
Of course. Thus, a serious problem in the modern complex world, in which trust is very seriously and rapidly decaying.
"[Being] open to what we hear without believing it lets us navigate the world with self responsibly instead of outsourcing truth to other people."
Exactly. Problem is, we *need* to outsource 99.99...+%, and most times several layers deep. Our incredibly complex world has been held together with trust, and now...
My dear God. William Godwin once conjectured that no one would ever choose an “experience machine” over reality. He was so very wrong. I’m going to go hug my dog now.
At first, I misread you to write that you were going to go HANG your dog now, which actually made sense gotterdammerungically.
I'm glad I misread you, but I think a lot of us have that instinct about ourselves and our lives these days.
How did we let things deteriorate to such a status? Why couldn't Congress legislate usefully, placing strong limits on the use of AI, demanding that users of it in media make clear that what the viewer is about to watch is AI derived, and how it is?
Whoever reads this, please don't tell me that such a thing would be fascistic and unconstitutional. Justice Robert Jackson was right when he noted of mad libertarian types that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
The invasion of AI is challenging our ability to trust each other like no other invention in human history. AI is "haystacking truth", where accurate facts, honest reporting, and reasonable opinion, become harder to find as the haystack grows ever larger, filled with so much falsity and really, really good deepfake videos.
My husband and I recently wrote a piece "Welcome to the Analog Renaissance: The Future is Trust" that speaks to the issues Ted raises here:
"What happens when large segments of society live by technological lies in their education, their work, their personal lives? There is a risk that we will move away from the ideal of truth, and away the ideal of meritocracy, of a meaningful connection between effort and achievement, and instead drift toward a “skeptocracy”, where we are chronically skeptical or suspicious of the success of others, doubting if their achievements are based on actual effort or talent."
"What happens when large segments of society live by technological lies in their education, their work, their personal lives? "
Well, the clarity of the Soviet-style nakedness of endemic lying and two-class societies in the "democratic" West has been emerging to most of us for quite a while now. Certainly, the past two decades of creeping totalitarianism in national governments since 9/11 removed all doubts.
"There is a risk that we will move away from the ideal of truth"
News report from beyond-the-pale: Loss of trust in asserted "truth" is well past the risk phase. We, those of us outside the chattering-classes bubble, have been grappling with the consequences, and that is the main reason "inexplicable" political eruptions have been occurring worldwide. I know, the establishment has been hard at work "making sense" of them, mainly it seems by asserting a mysterious decline in "rationality" in half the population from what prevailed in the mid-late 20th century. Maybe it's something in the water? Maybe the lot of us can be pillow-smothered away by AI, and no one will be the wiser? Not a chance.
"the ideal of meritocracy"
Meritocracy is not an ideal. It is simply a replacement of the previous set of value judgments on who-should-get-what, which as I trust you know were class, race, sex, etc. (Its pretense is right there in the name itself, which really should instead be labeled something like "geniocracy" or the like.) But at least we can all agree that all the lazy dummies out there should live in squalor and terror, as they deserve it, due to their foolish choices in creating their brains, temperaments, parents, upbringing, and finally, their failure to catch up, no? Plus, as they're idiots, they have no idea what they're missing anyway.
I agree with almost everything you wrote Ted. My only quibble is that we can not wait for politicians and businessmen to sound the alarm. Most of the politicians are owned by the mega-corporations. The mega business people are only interested in their bottom line not our well being.
I’ve thought about this too. I think AI will lead us back to a premodern need to depend on eyewitness accounts, and that this, in the very long run, could be good:
“Here is my basic thinking:
If we cannot distinguish true images and videos from AI-generated ones, we will have to dismiss all images and videos as sources of truth.
Apart from images and videos, all we have left in truth assessment is the eyewitness account.
Truth-telling, therefore, on a human level, will return to pre-technological standards and practices.”
…
I think that AI will help us rediscover what has been true all along, that discerning truth is inescapably tied to trusting in other human beings. Undoubtedly, this will also mean that lying will have much larger consequences socially. If you lie, as in ages past, you will be dismissed from society. The old proverb, your word is your bond, will become palpably true for the ordinary person as well as for the reporter, and we pray that it will be true also for the politician. I think we are seeing the beginning of this in the wholesale rejection of what was once called the mainstream media, which by the numbers should not be called mainstream anymore. If you are in the business of truth-telling, and you are for years caught in blatant lies, at some point the audience walks away.”
I totally agree. And I think that the better grounded in reality that we already are, the easier this will be. And I'm not trying to be a brown-noser but I really think that is the best purpose of things like Ted's Humanities Reading List, to be fully grounded in reality.
What about publicly traded companies. Absent fraud, they still have to report their numbers in fairly great detail to the SEC and get third party verification by an accountant. Maybe that's a model that could be adopted. yes, we had Enron, WorldCom and others, but those were exceptions to the rule and those executives went to jail for a very long time.
P.S. I don't own and am not affiliated with an accounting firm so no self-interest in this.
I sincerely appreciate this article because it correctly identifies a very real set of consequences that modern technology -- especially generative artificial intelligence -- may impose on human civilization as we know it. These consequences were not unforeseen however . . .
I am currently employed, at 40+ hrs/week, on a team of thousands of human linguistics experts, located throughout the globe, as generative AI associates. Our role is to identify, correct, and prevent the falsehoods, hallucinations, inheret biases, and other misstatements of fact that are sometimes given by AI chatbots as responses to prompts requested by other humans. As you can imagine, this can be a very demanding occupation, but we are compensated quite handsomely for our work.
This job title has been around for approximately 4-5 years and, today, we are making large strides of progress in the right direction. We feel that, as more qualified workers enter this rapidly growing field, hopefully, with a little more time, we will be able to stave off the catastrophe you have so accurately predicted. Thanks for bringing much needed attention to this phenomenon. Keep publishing your insightful articles!
I wonder about this too. I spent an abnormal amount of time on ChatGPT between April and May this year and after witnessing Sora (image and video creation by prompts) I had a bit of a mental health dent. Things are no longer as they seem. I’m glad you wrote about it because how we respond to this will mean everything for the road ahead of us. I have been thinking how to live a life without internet and computers. I can still remember what that felt like. I used to spent hours reading printed books. I’ve not done that for ages.
Been preaching this sermon since we stopped caring about replacing musicians 50 years ago. AI “tools” now improve our writing to the point where one wonders why bother with the mistake prone, inarticulate human in the equation. I’ll say it again: there should at least be an international AI label everywhere there’s a trace of AI input. For starters, it has no place in the arts or psychology. It’s NOT human. It’s an IT! John Williams can lift from Wagner; they’re both human. AI steals from the sum total of all human inspiration. Draw the line at Human.
One more thing: I’m privy to discussions going on within an “major agency” to permanently replace an entire creative team and the talent pool they support because the pressure to deliver at the speed and expense of AI is too irresistible a force to push back on. “Sad” is too weak a word…followed by “fear and loathing”.
"..another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality."
Idk about everybody else, but i feel like this happened for me a few years ago. All this online shit? Its just bullshit, its not real. People act like this is life, but this is not life. Life happens in the real world. This "checking out" to live online is exsctly how we ended up here, with a crazy ass president and people who dont know how to *talk*, let alone *do* anything.
And at first i thought maybe *i* was crazy. Bc hell, *everybodies* doing it, right? So it must be me, right? Nah, i learned long ago to get my truth for myself(which isnt to say i wont listen to people, and look for the truth in what they say. But i also look for results. Without results, its just more bs).
I remember a few years ago trying to participate in a discussion(or reddit lol) about equal rights for lgbtq(which, im for rights for everybody, i dont hate over shit like that), and they went in my profile and came back and told me i wasnt "allowed" to participate bc i am straight, white, and male. Well shit lol. That they were acting just like the people that hate them mattered not. What mattered was my skin color, my gender, and who i like to fuck.
My point in all that is thats when i saw this online world for the bs it really is. That shit had nothing to do with rights for people, it had to do with people giving themselves over to their most base emotional responses. I sure dont need that in my very real life.
I may have wandered off topic but, my point being, "shared reality" has already been stretched thin. I assume im being lied to, and enjoy the pleasant surprise when on occasion im not. And ill tell ya, that understanding has made *my* life much better.
So heres to anybody who has continued this whole time to "keep it real". They wont have any problems in this new world of bs. Only those who were silly enough to put their faith in the internet will struggle. But what did they expect, huh? Idk, blows my mind what people will do for the chance to drink the damn koolaid lol, like dont you know thats poison?
I've been seeing a TON of "fictional bands" (in the description box) after listening to "[Full Album] (70s Psychedelic Rock)" -- I can tell, but unfortunately, 90% of the comments are so positive, but it's because new music stinks and they are grading it on a curve... Hundreds of thousands of views.
When you've had the great open mics, I look and compare the view count before/after, and people don't seem to give anything a chance (maybe too many letdowns?).. I look at my statistics/analytics, and a majority stop listening by the 30 second mark - not even giving a chance to let the song start.
I'm a musician and I'm too old to do anything else. But I will not go down that AI path. I use microphones and real instruments.
It was already hard enough to break through the surfeit of new music in our current digitized era of diminishing returns - about once a year or so I collect my assorted streaming royalties and buy something off the dollar menu - but AI-generated music just piles on the problem. I’m about to start going out to play bars again, where people can see me as an older guy with an acoustic guitar - and maybe I’ll record another album with one voice, one guitar and one mic so I can sell physical copies.
Yesterday a video in one of my feeds popped up showing a healthy Bruce Willis talking about his recovery with the help of Dr. Sanjay Gupta from CNN developing a new miracle potion which sounded ridiculous. Bruce Willis sounded and looked like himself, so did the doctor!
Of course, I was able to google it and see other videos of the doctor talking about Willis' very sad dementia and was educated to know that these deep fakes exists and put the two together, but if more nefarious actors were involved or if google had become overrun by these videos hiding the originals, or worse if a google Gemini AI search just served up the fake video, things could go very badly.
In the age of artificial intelligence, we must lean into authentic humanity. Let’s rebuild high-trust society from the ground up. Check in on people who are isolated so they don't get one-shotted by AI.
Ted: As usual, you have discerned the difficulties in the present cultural milieu. A couple of thoughts: If scarcity of trust is increasing, the cost of creating and sustaining trust will also rise. You accurately state that we need impregnable (a "pregnant" word if there ever was one) sources of information. And you hypothesize the need for persons who are custodians of truth. This brought to mind the concept of "Fair Witness" in Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," so maybe scifi authors intuited this development. And finally, if trust is scarce, so is the lingua franca for developing trust: attention. More than ever we must cultivate the capacity for sustained attention. The problem: what should we pay attention to?
So we will all be living in a Philip K. Dick novel.
Already are. Have been.
Personally I don't think it's such a terrible thing for us to mistrust information sources. All accounts, whether they are from the news or from other people, have always been biased or inaccurate, whether innocently or manipulatively. When we unthinking trust our news sources, we get polarization (right wing people believing right wing need sources, left wing believing left wing sources) and dogmatism (different religions interpreting religious texts to further their own agendas). Bring open to what we hear without believing it lets us navigate the world with self responsibly instead of outsourcing truth to other people. There is a lot to be said to paying attention with our eyes and ears to the world around us, rather than simply getting information about the world from other people's narratives. Healthy skepticism is not a bad thing. I don't disagree with your concerns or the evidence you cite to support them, I simply see another angle to trust that offers something potentially positive.
Most people don’t have the resources (critical thinking, media access, time, education) to see through elaborate fakes and manipulation. Ted Gioia readers - while affected - are not the main problem here. But even today people with voting rights live in information silos and don’t care much or are not able to see that they are played. This will get much worse.
Has this not always been the case? I remember 20-30 years ago, most people were just as uninformed as they are now. The difference is they didnt make that their whole identity.
There has *always* been a vast flock of sheep. Thats part of humanity, those that want to be told what to think. Harnessing the power of that flock has been the work of "leaders" since time immemorial. What we're witnessing now is just them getting better at it, the next evolution in the grand manipulation that brought us nazi germany, the catholic church, those assholes that built the pyramids, etc etc ETC.
Interesting. Essentially you are asking - what is the truth? There are facts that can be proven (rational). Then there are stories and opinions (emotional). The greatest risk is we lose sight of what we know to be true through solid evidence. The rise of the anti-vaxx movement is an excellent example of what happens when people get swept up in emotional causes, ignoring rational facts and arguments. The rise of the ill-informed influencer who uses emotional arguments to win fame and earn money is another.
Yes, but ... if you have no reason to mistrust information sources, then empty, groundless skepticism is not rational. It's madness. The world is very complicated; we're learning more about it every day. We can't know everything. We have to trust experts and we have to trust social institutions. Up to a point, of course. Case in point -- if you don't trust your doctor's advice, you can get a second opinion -- from a doctor. Not a neighbor, not somebody on television. That would be the sort of madness that Ted is writing about.
"if you have no reason to mistrust information sources, then empty, groundless skepticism is not rational. It's madness."
On the contrary, one has every reason -- today, in the US, if not the West -- to be quite tentative, if not skeptical, of anyone one doesn't know, and of anything one doesn't know. For example, I don't know what kind of world you live in, but it is clearly insulated from some dangerous modern realities.
"We have to trust experts and we have to trust social institutions. Up to a point, of course."
Modern life *forces* to trust "experts", but that says nothing supporting their trustworthiness. You believe you have defined what is rational "up to a point", but one never knows the true limits. Sometimes these "experts" are self-declared and are narcissists; sometimes they did little beyond ferally climbing a ladder to power; sometimes they thoroughly corrupted by money and other life constraints, wittingly, or not ("It is difficult to get a man to understand [or claim] something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"); etc.
"We can't know everything."
Of course. Thus, a serious problem in the modern complex world, in which trust is very seriously and rapidly decaying.
"[Being] open to what we hear without believing it lets us navigate the world with self responsibly instead of outsourcing truth to other people."
Exactly. Problem is, we *need* to outsource 99.99...+%, and most times several layers deep. Our incredibly complex world has been held together with trust, and now...
My dear God. William Godwin once conjectured that no one would ever choose an “experience machine” over reality. He was so very wrong. I’m going to go hug my dog now.
Hugging the dog right now is an EXCELLENT idea. I shall join you and hug mine!
At first, I misread you to write that you were going to go HANG your dog now, which actually made sense gotterdammerungically.
I'm glad I misread you, but I think a lot of us have that instinct about ourselves and our lives these days.
How did we let things deteriorate to such a status? Why couldn't Congress legislate usefully, placing strong limits on the use of AI, demanding that users of it in media make clear that what the viewer is about to watch is AI derived, and how it is?
Whoever reads this, please don't tell me that such a thing would be fascistic and unconstitutional. Justice Robert Jackson was right when he noted of mad libertarian types that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
This will drive in person meetings and interaction. Integrity, honesty, and dependability will be coins of the realm.
Agreed. So much so, that I think widespread use of electronic communication (of *all kinds*) will "crash" in some not-too-distant future.
That's one big reason why I continue to live in a city, despite the well-known dangers.
The invasion of AI is challenging our ability to trust each other like no other invention in human history. AI is "haystacking truth", where accurate facts, honest reporting, and reasonable opinion, become harder to find as the haystack grows ever larger, filled with so much falsity and really, really good deepfake videos.
My husband and I recently wrote a piece "Welcome to the Analog Renaissance: The Future is Trust" that speaks to the issues Ted raises here:
"What happens when large segments of society live by technological lies in their education, their work, their personal lives? There is a risk that we will move away from the ideal of truth, and away the ideal of meritocracy, of a meaningful connection between effort and achievement, and instead drift toward a “skeptocracy”, where we are chronically skeptical or suspicious of the success of others, doubting if their achievements are based on actual effort or talent."
We shared our thoughts on building outposts of human trust in the digital wilderness here: https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-analog-renaissance
LinkedIn demonstrates the skeptocracy in CorpWorld, every day.
"What happens when large segments of society live by technological lies in their education, their work, their personal lives? "
Well, the clarity of the Soviet-style nakedness of endemic lying and two-class societies in the "democratic" West has been emerging to most of us for quite a while now. Certainly, the past two decades of creeping totalitarianism in national governments since 9/11 removed all doubts.
"There is a risk that we will move away from the ideal of truth"
News report from beyond-the-pale: Loss of trust in asserted "truth" is well past the risk phase. We, those of us outside the chattering-classes bubble, have been grappling with the consequences, and that is the main reason "inexplicable" political eruptions have been occurring worldwide. I know, the establishment has been hard at work "making sense" of them, mainly it seems by asserting a mysterious decline in "rationality" in half the population from what prevailed in the mid-late 20th century. Maybe it's something in the water? Maybe the lot of us can be pillow-smothered away by AI, and no one will be the wiser? Not a chance.
"the ideal of meritocracy"
Meritocracy is not an ideal. It is simply a replacement of the previous set of value judgments on who-should-get-what, which as I trust you know were class, race, sex, etc. (Its pretense is right there in the name itself, which really should instead be labeled something like "geniocracy" or the like.) But at least we can all agree that all the lazy dummies out there should live in squalor and terror, as they deserve it, due to their foolish choices in creating their brains, temperaments, parents, upbringing, and finally, their failure to catch up, no? Plus, as they're idiots, they have no idea what they're missing anyway.
I agree with almost everything you wrote Ted. My only quibble is that we can not wait for politicians and businessmen to sound the alarm. Most of the politicians are owned by the mega-corporations. The mega business people are only interested in their bottom line not our well being.
https://cambron.substack.com/p/ai-truth-telling-and-the-return-of
I’ve thought about this too. I think AI will lead us back to a premodern need to depend on eyewitness accounts, and that this, in the very long run, could be good:
“Here is my basic thinking:
If we cannot distinguish true images and videos from AI-generated ones, we will have to dismiss all images and videos as sources of truth.
Apart from images and videos, all we have left in truth assessment is the eyewitness account.
Truth-telling, therefore, on a human level, will return to pre-technological standards and practices.”
…
I think that AI will help us rediscover what has been true all along, that discerning truth is inescapably tied to trusting in other human beings. Undoubtedly, this will also mean that lying will have much larger consequences socially. If you lie, as in ages past, you will be dismissed from society. The old proverb, your word is your bond, will become palpably true for the ordinary person as well as for the reporter, and we pray that it will be true also for the politician. I think we are seeing the beginning of this in the wholesale rejection of what was once called the mainstream media, which by the numbers should not be called mainstream anymore. If you are in the business of truth-telling, and you are for years caught in blatant lies, at some point the audience walks away.”
I totally agree. And I think that the better grounded in reality that we already are, the easier this will be. And I'm not trying to be a brown-noser but I really think that is the best purpose of things like Ted's Humanities Reading List, to be fully grounded in reality.
Could this bring a renaissance of the traditional newspaper? After all, professional journalism incorporates a process of verification.
Another thought provoking article.
What about publicly traded companies. Absent fraud, they still have to report their numbers in fairly great detail to the SEC and get third party verification by an accountant. Maybe that's a model that could be adopted. yes, we had Enron, WorldCom and others, but those were exceptions to the rule and those executives went to jail for a very long time.
P.S. I don't own and am not affiliated with an accounting firm so no self-interest in this.
those were just the token scapegoats
I sincerely appreciate this article because it correctly identifies a very real set of consequences that modern technology -- especially generative artificial intelligence -- may impose on human civilization as we know it. These consequences were not unforeseen however . . .
I am currently employed, at 40+ hrs/week, on a team of thousands of human linguistics experts, located throughout the globe, as generative AI associates. Our role is to identify, correct, and prevent the falsehoods, hallucinations, inheret biases, and other misstatements of fact that are sometimes given by AI chatbots as responses to prompts requested by other humans. As you can imagine, this can be a very demanding occupation, but we are compensated quite handsomely for our work.
This job title has been around for approximately 4-5 years and, today, we are making large strides of progress in the right direction. We feel that, as more qualified workers enter this rapidly growing field, hopefully, with a little more time, we will be able to stave off the catastrophe you have so accurately predicted. Thanks for bringing much needed attention to this phenomenon. Keep publishing your insightful articles!
I wonder about this too. I spent an abnormal amount of time on ChatGPT between April and May this year and after witnessing Sora (image and video creation by prompts) I had a bit of a mental health dent. Things are no longer as they seem. I’m glad you wrote about it because how we respond to this will mean everything for the road ahead of us. I have been thinking how to live a life without internet and computers. I can still remember what that felt like. I used to spent hours reading printed books. I’ve not done that for ages.
Been preaching this sermon since we stopped caring about replacing musicians 50 years ago. AI “tools” now improve our writing to the point where one wonders why bother with the mistake prone, inarticulate human in the equation. I’ll say it again: there should at least be an international AI label everywhere there’s a trace of AI input. For starters, it has no place in the arts or psychology. It’s NOT human. It’s an IT! John Williams can lift from Wagner; they’re both human. AI steals from the sum total of all human inspiration. Draw the line at Human.
One more thing: I’m privy to discussions going on within an “major agency” to permanently replace an entire creative team and the talent pool they support because the pressure to deliver at the speed and expense of AI is too irresistible a force to push back on. “Sad” is too weak a word…followed by “fear and loathing”.
"..another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality."
Idk about everybody else, but i feel like this happened for me a few years ago. All this online shit? Its just bullshit, its not real. People act like this is life, but this is not life. Life happens in the real world. This "checking out" to live online is exsctly how we ended up here, with a crazy ass president and people who dont know how to *talk*, let alone *do* anything.
And at first i thought maybe *i* was crazy. Bc hell, *everybodies* doing it, right? So it must be me, right? Nah, i learned long ago to get my truth for myself(which isnt to say i wont listen to people, and look for the truth in what they say. But i also look for results. Without results, its just more bs).
I remember a few years ago trying to participate in a discussion(or reddit lol) about equal rights for lgbtq(which, im for rights for everybody, i dont hate over shit like that), and they went in my profile and came back and told me i wasnt "allowed" to participate bc i am straight, white, and male. Well shit lol. That they were acting just like the people that hate them mattered not. What mattered was my skin color, my gender, and who i like to fuck.
My point in all that is thats when i saw this online world for the bs it really is. That shit had nothing to do with rights for people, it had to do with people giving themselves over to their most base emotional responses. I sure dont need that in my very real life.
I may have wandered off topic but, my point being, "shared reality" has already been stretched thin. I assume im being lied to, and enjoy the pleasant surprise when on occasion im not. And ill tell ya, that understanding has made *my* life much better.
So heres to anybody who has continued this whole time to "keep it real". They wont have any problems in this new world of bs. Only those who were silly enough to put their faith in the internet will struggle. But what did they expect, huh? Idk, blows my mind what people will do for the chance to drink the damn koolaid lol, like dont you know thats poison?