החפירות של טליה

today i had a phone call with a family member who likes to talk. well, that's a lot of my family members (how do you think i ended up this way?) but that particular family member is the kind who likes to go on long rants about why i should do something in particular. in this case, why i should learn how to use AI. and it was fascinating. not because i think AI is fascinating, quite the opposite, but because it was an interesting insight into what a person who enjoys the slop, uses it as part of their work and who follows excitedly the developments in the field thinks the future would look like. it's not what i imagined. it's worse.

in their imagination, the future looks like companies actually innovating being replaced by the literal exact same product only this one looks like a chatbot, asking you the exact same questions, only in text instead of forms and buttons. it looks like bot replying to bot emails, bot summarising bot lectures and bot grading bot essays. it looks like all small works of creativity around us, from cover photos to jingles, being done cheaply and with no soul. it looks like workers doing gigs in improving the output of AI from slop to usable, never having any form of employment stability.

of course none of those were worded like that, but when someone tells you “why can't i do [something that you can already do], why is there no agent for that?” or “yeah i created a jingle for my husband's business using [AI whose every output i've heard so far sounds soulless]” or “they're looking for people to monitor the AI, you could probably do that in your free time” or even “i enjoy this newsletter but had i had time i'd probably have ran it through a local model to summarise and save me time” you can see what's hiding the surface.

but perhaps the most interesting conclusion, is that even for the advocates, the future looks terrifying. it looks like them chasing the new framework, the new model, the new way to prompt the chatbot for the perfect result, otherwise they'll be left behind. and they're so scared of that.

נכתב על ידי טליה, ״הלוחמת בטרפיות״. @yuvalne@tooot.im

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0