It would be hard for me to tell you why we need to be skeptical of AI, because I read so much, it’s difficult to distill it all. I can only point you toward bits and pieces. But watching this Jon Stewart interview with the dogged journalist Carole Cadwalladr is a good start.
Here’s today’s newsletter from Josh Marshall, called “Artificial Intelligence and The Posture of Skepticism”, which concludes:
Who takes the time to really dig into most reports? Who actually tracks down every individual citation? This is even more the case when — so important to remember this — you remember that AI’s “thought” process is based on producing answers that appear valid and credible to humans. So the fakes will be packaged in unremarkable and inconspicuous ways. How many legal briefs are getting produced like this?
We all know and most of us have experienced the way AI is already clogging up a lot of the internet. But that’s stuff meant to get picked up by search engines — write ups on how to change a tire, the net worth of Brad Pitt, recipes. Sort of who cares? But there’s a lot of evidence that AI work product is creeping into “important” areas too. So we’re already living in the AI age but what it’s doing is less replacing humans or operating at a level comparable to humans but seeding the information world with a new generation of slop, superficially credible but falsity-seeded content.
