via Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter:
“The way I see it, the jaw-dropping speed of generative AI’s embrace is essentially a large-scale acknowledgement that modern life is sort of miserable and that most people don’t actually care if anything works anymore. Which is, honestly, fair. Our lives are full of tasks that no one wants to do that offer little reward for doing them well. The systems we live, work, and create inside of are simply too large to comprehend or really care about. I mean, at this point, pretty much everyone I know in an office job that isn’t in media is using ChatGPT at work basically all of the time. But as more companies push to integrate themselves into AI platforms, it’s also revealing that they don’t really care either. The institutions and industries responsible for these systems we all hate don’t want to maintain them either. And we know this because there is simply no way you can say you care about something if you replace it with AI. You can’t say you care about audio production if you replace voice actors. You can’t say you care about food service if you replace drive-thru workers. You can’t say you care about advertising if you replace copywriters. What you care about is speed, scale, and, if this stuff works correctly, money.”
@mathewi It says modern life is isolating, hostile, violent, unpredictable, and threatening. It says people want a friend, even if it’s a stupid regurgitating chat bot trained by the wage slaves of wannabe-oligarchs. That we don’t care if it’s wrong suggests we think of it as sentient, and, at least for now, that sentient “being” isn’t overtly trying to kill us for the Russian oligarchy, unlike the truly repulsive half of our political class and perhaps the billionaires funding chat bots.