Standing on the brains of giants

I came across a very interesting article about AI that everyone should consider before, well, laying off an entire design team or in-house marketing group. It’s by Jonathan Zdziarski. In the piece he writes that AI isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s someone else’s intelligence.

We’ll quote liberally here because these points are important:

The danger of this type of ML is not that it will take jobs (it definitely will, and already is), but why it will take jobs. It will take jobs not because the computer is replacing the thinking of one worker. It will take jobs because the computer is competing with that one worker, using the experience of a million others – how could anyone compete with that? Training material is, at a deconstructed level, the critical patterns of other people’s thoughts, ideas, writings, music, theology, facts, opinions, poetry, and so on. ML has proven wildly successful at identifying these critical patterns and gluing them back together in some different way that delivers the desired result, but at the end of the day, all of its intelligence indeed belongs to the other people whose content was used to train it, almost always without their permission. In the end, generative AI takes from the world’s best artists, musicians, philosophers, and other thinkers – erasing their identities, and assigning credit to its output. Without the proper restraints, it will produce the master forgeries of our generation, and blur the lines between what we view as human ideas and synthesized ones.