I don’t mean this personally, but just because you feel or perhaps are even able to quantify amplified creativity and output, that doesn’t mean it’s not mediocre. After all, mediocrity is subjective. And even if you’re doing incredible things with it, there are most certainly a lot of folks (I’d argue more) who absolutely are not. In my senior role at a software company, I’m increasingly having to spend more time protecting our products, marketing, documentation, and support from developers, product and design staff, support department, and even vendors from jamming in broken, poor quality output from automation.

The article touches on a more philosophical (and some cases actual [1]) negative feedback loop: these tools are trained on human output, explodes into popularity, and–greatly boosted by seedier, low rent content farmers and the likes as well as mind boggling scale and speed–is fed back into the same input stream: akin to the “photocopy of a photocopy of a…” effect. I recall years ago scoffing at talks about how the Internet will soon be an unusable torrent of detritus that drowns out actual useful or interesting information and looks at Google search results here we are.

When it comes to generative tools, sure, there are defenses and mechanisms to mitigate this effect to a certain extent, but it also has a likewise effect on humans and society, which doesn’t, not really. We are constantly driving the bar lower, both from the business and consumer perspective.

A parallel: Look at mass produced, cheap consumer goods. I’m not ancient, but I’m old enough to watch my era of cheap goods (which my betters lamented over compared to “their time”) also become replaced by notably worse quality products than before. We don’t even seem to care if the thing meets some minimum threshold of functional in its purpose, it only matters that it’s immediately available and cheap enough to dispose of if it sucks especially bad. This is an excellent proposition for economies that have been working extremely hard to push society in this direction. It’s awful for everything else. This is a drain-circling race to the bottom with disastrous ecological and human implications.

Of course, you can dismiss this as shouting into the void, technological old man yells at the Cloud… which it is. The ram has touched the wall, Pandora’s box has been opened, the genie is out of the bottle. But when I compare it to other technological disruptions in human history, “AI” products and services are impinging upon widespread sociopolitical and economic stressors and challenges resulting from just the regular-ass Information Age. Since we are increasingly a technological society[2], and our most trusted but flawed quantifier for value and worth is money, profitability is the predominant motivator from big tech. Not so much its benefit to humanity or whatever delusion VC sociopaths and techno-narcissists are on about. AI is a tool. I’m not afraid of tools. I’m afraid of a race who has a difficult relationship with its tools and is prone to squander them on stupid or awful things.

I think the confluence of hyper capitalism, nascent technology, and human nature will make slowly boiled frogs of all of us, cut off from our true potential emotionally, intellectually, physically, artistically, morally, and ethically.

[1] https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society