Discussion of AI is increasingly prevalent in many areas. I'm not convinced that the pitches for what AI can or might do will pan out, but I've no doubt at all that there will be a huge scramble in any number of areas (technology, investment, startups, media, governance, ...) to adopt, promote, explore, regulate, and abuse the tech.
Having been around and in the tech world at the time, the general feeling is reminiscent of the buzz, hype, and cons around the World Wide Web in the mid-to-late 1990s, as people were starting to hear about it, not understanding much of what it might do, and making all kinds of bold predictions of the utopia or dystopia which might result. The reality ... matched little of any of that discussion.[1]
The Web largely addressed distribution, taking the place of both the printing press and various channels (physical and broadcast) of media distribution. Generative AI is more about how content itself is generated and evaluated, and has the added twist that it is very much a black box, including to those who create the models and systems, which will undoubtedly change what its own ultimate effects and impacts are, though again there's a likely wide range of positive and negative factors.
I follow numerous media and podcasts, on a wide range of topics and languages, and AI has been popping up with extreme frequency in many of them.
Whether it's good or bad, this is undeniably big.
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Notes:
1. An exception to the poor predictions is Andrew L. Shapiro's The Control Revolution (1999), which I'd read for the first time a year or two ago. It seems to me to have done a quite good job of exploring both the upsides and downsides of the Web, and remains worth reading, though as a historical document now.
Having been around and in the tech world at the time, the general feeling is reminiscent of the buzz, hype, and cons around the World Wide Web in the mid-to-late 1990s, as people were starting to hear about it, not understanding much of what it might do, and making all kinds of bold predictions of the utopia or dystopia which might result. The reality ... matched little of any of that discussion.[1]
The Web largely addressed distribution, taking the place of both the printing press and various channels (physical and broadcast) of media distribution. Generative AI is more about how content itself is generated and evaluated, and has the added twist that it is very much a black box, including to those who create the models and systems, which will undoubtedly change what its own ultimate effects and impacts are, though again there's a likely wide range of positive and negative factors.
I follow numerous media and podcasts, on a wide range of topics and languages, and AI has been popping up with extreme frequency in many of them.
Whether it's good or bad, this is undeniably big.
________________________________
Notes:
1. An exception to the poor predictions is Andrew L. Shapiro's The Control Revolution (1999), which I'd read for the first time a year or two ago. It seems to me to have done a quite good job of exploring both the upsides and downsides of the Web, and remains worth reading, though as a historical document now.