As Gary Smith noted the other day, many people, spurred on by the ravings of AI prophets, attribute human qualities to machines and thus easily imagine a tech apocalypse in which chatbots — that cannot, by nature, think — are supposedly running the world. Let’s look at why that is not really going to happen.

First, a bucket of ice water from cold, hard reality

Chatbots depend on grabbing, repurposing, and disgorging large amounts of copy which, from the creators’ perspective, is copyright violation. Writers, artists, and content managers take copyright violation seriously; creation is their living. So yes they are suing bigtime.

Jonathan Bartlett‘s well-advised caution that many different people’s content is used, blended, in these AI products isn’t going to deter the creators. After all, if someone steals a farmer’s bell peppers and mixes them in with 27 other veggies to make a salad, does the farmer feel any less robbed? Does he have fewer rights in consequence?

Anyway the results are underwhelming. As MIT economics prof Daron Acemoglu predicts at Wired,

More and more evidence will emerge that generative AI and large language models provide false information and are prone to hallucination—where an AI simply makes stuff up, and gets it wrong. Hopes of a quick fix to the hallucination problem via supervised learning, where these models are taught to stay away from questionable sources or statements, will prove optimistic at best. Because the architecture of these models is based on predicting the next word or words in a sequence, it will prove exceedingly difficult to have the predictions be anchored to known truths.

Daron Acemoglu, “Get Ready for the Great AI Disappointment,” Wired, January 18, 2024

Even the concept of “known truths” is a problem in an age when “disinformation” is so often just information contrary to whatever the government is currently saying. But that’s a story for another day.

No, slower, but more complete

The actual way AI will disrupt everything, Dave Friedman suggests, is more like this:

I think the disruption will take longer to occur, and be more of a continuous process of adaptation, than many others seem to think. Most revolutions do not operate like a light switch. They’re a slow burn. Ignore the smoldering and you’ll eventually get scorched. Anticipate the eventual conflagration, and you’ll be well-positioned to take advantage of the inevitable.

Dave Friedman, “When will AI disrupt everything?,” Buy the Rumor, Sell the News, January 2, 2024

He goes on to describe what he observed while sitting in at a taping of the Daily Show hosted by Jon Stewart some years ago.

What has stuck with me over the years is simply the sheer number of people it takes to produce an episode of a TV show. You don’t just have the talent. You have makeup and wardrobe people. You have people who schedule guests. You have people who write dialogue. You have people who man cameras. You have people who operate lighting rigs. You have people who design and dress the sets. You have people who organize all of these people. You have people in the background who just manage all of the people managing other people.

Friedman, “Disrupt everything?,”

AI can obviate most of that. Here is an example: Elvis lives! … in AI format:

Company reps describe it as a “jaw-dropping concert experience” where a life-sized digital Elvis “will perform iconic moments in musical history on a UK stage for the first time.”

The show will combine multiple technical elements, including AI, holographic projections, augmented reality, and live theater to make it look like Elvis is performing live on stage.

Amanda Harding, “Elvis Presley Concert To Debut In London Using AI Technology,” DailyWire, January 4, 2024

As the technology matures, fewer people will be needed to make it all happen and the iconic digital Elvis — and countless other departed greats — will be in competition with budding young stars of today.

I was trying to think what this reminded me of and then I remembered: The way the printing press changed Europe 600 years ago. As historian Ada Palmer puts it, “Suddenly, what had been a project to educate only the few wealthiest elite in this society could now become a project to put a library in every medium-sized town, and a library in the house of every reasonably wealthy merchant family.” Many books have been written about the outcome of making information more easily available to anyone who could read. Similarly, AI means that more technology will be in the hands of more people to do with as they wish. If it’s filmmaking, for example, chances are you won’t make a lot of money but on the other hand, the new technology is there and no one is stopping you.

One thing that’s very different from the birth of publishing is that we don’t all currently face a long and costly war against outright state censorship before the value of the new technologies can be fully realized.