Big Tech Is Duping the Media Yet Again

There's no punishment too severe for using the technology that consumes human creativity and spits out worthless nonsense.

Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

I am of two minds about AI. On one hand, the technology behind “AI,” as the current generation of machine-learning software has been branded for marketing purposes, is still in its infancy and is capable of basically nothing that its proponents claim it can do. AI is this half-decade’s “self-driving cars,” a technology that you really don’t hear much about anymore because after billions of dollars of speculative investment and years of laudatory press coverage, the companies actually making this stuff have correctly realized that it’s really only half baked and they can’t quite make it work yet. Sure, there are cars tooling around San Francisco with no drivers, but you can make them stop by putting a traffic cone on their hood, so forgive me if I’m not going to think about that for the time being.

On the other hand, however, I find the concept of algorithmically-created “content,” particularly content that mimics the products of human creativity, like art or writing or music, to be both existentially terrifying and deeply perverse. It should not exist. Those who use it should be penalized or shunned or, if I had my way, confined to a deep undersea “research” station that cannot interact with the outside world in any way.

Where I land, I think, is that AI is just another horseshit tech guy scam that’s also pretty ugly and frightening, both because of what it represents and because of the potential fallout for what happens when people fall for said scam. We are seeing that today.