Generative AI can save time, but it also hallucinates material, inventing facts and then conveying that material confidently. We need to use caution and not put our complete faith and trust in automated systems.
Let’s talk about Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). It’s arguably one of the most revolutionary and disruptive technologies in human history. It’s also a technological black box that people treat as a silver bullet for everything from content creation to software development.
The hype, at least, is nothing new. This happens with just about every innovation that’s even vaguely disruptive. People who don’t fully understand how it works take it and run.
They overpromise and underdeliver. They primp and preen and howl about how the technology is a shortcut to success. To hear them talk, GenAI isn’t simply an evolution of a technology that’s been around since the nineties.
No, it’s the most revolutionary innovation ever to exist! It can do everything and anything! It’ll transform your workflows, replace your employees, do your taxes, walk your dog, even raise your children!
It’s a familiar song and dance we’ve all witnessed for decades. But there’s something different this time around. See, what makes GenAI unique is its potential for harm.
Entire industries disintegrate as leaders with more capital than business sense replace humans with machines. Content creators watch helplessly as thoughtless algorithms steal and regurgitate their work. Search engines are flooded with generic slop that drowns out anything original or insightful. All the while, massive AI data centers immolate the environment.
And the less said about deepfakes and AI-driven cyberattacks, the better.
Escaping the AI Slop Bucket
For someone who’s always been fascinated with AI, the technology’s current state is frankly a bit depressing. Applied properly, GenAI has immense potential to change the world for the better. Instead, businesses are putting profits over progress and using machine intelligence to cut corners.
I refuse to do that.
I refuse to fall back on AI-generated content just to save a little time or money. I refuse to sacrifice quality, accuracy, and integrity at the altar of empty productivity. I refuse to pump out hollow, forgettable slop with no voice or identity.
I refuse to abandon my standards for content that is:
- Frequently plagued with inaccuracies and hallucinations.
- Produced by models trained without consent on copyrighted data.
- Derivative and unoriginal.
- Created with tools and platforms that are prone to data leaks.
- Reliant on technology whose inner workings its creators can’t articulate.
Machine-written content’s sort of like a bag of chips from the Dollar Store. Sure, it’s filling. Maybe it’ll even keep you going for a bit.
But only eating chips for a month isn’t exactly a road to good health,
Content produced by human creatives, though? That’s a meal prepped by a personal chef. Filling, nourishing, fit for your tastes, and most importantly, memorable.
A More Intelligent Approach to AI
I should be clear that I’m not opposed to GenAI. Far from it. It has the potential to be an incredible and world-changing technology.
My problem is that this potential is being ignored. It’s being leveraged both unethically and irresponsibly. It’s being used to replace human intelligence instead of augmenting it.
I assume they hoped doing so would allow them to pull more revenue with less effort. Instead, it’s turned into little more than a money pit. They’ve spent the past several years sacrificing hundreds of billions to empty promises of productivity, innovation, and efficiency.
Ironically, it seems profits are among the things AI companies can’t generate.
ChatGPT developer OpenAI exemplifies this. The company is expected to reach $20 billion in annual revenue by the end of the year. It also signed two data center deals totaling $288 billion in October. By 2033, OpenAI anticipates costs of $1.4 trillion annually on data center rentals alone.
That’s higher than the GDP of most countries.
This needs to stop. We need to acknowledge what AI can and cannot do. We need to understand its limitations, or we’re never going to truly comprehend its strengths.
Artificial intelligence cannot replicate human creativity, intuition, or expertise. It cannot replace human copywriters, graphic designers, or web developers. And if the growing backlash against the technology is anything to go by, people are waking up to that fact.
They’re starting to understand that without human input, the content produced by AI is derivative, inaccurate, and unoriginal. They’re starting to understand that, for all its merits, AI cannot truly create. It can only imitate.
Anyone who claims otherwise simply doesn’t understand how it works.
