Better Living through Artificial Intelligence
How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Machine Learning
Last year, I argued that you shouldn’t use AI Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate content for you. This year, I’ve seen entire Medium profiles filled with articles that were clearly not written by a human. Needless to say, these articles are not very good, for the reasons I’ve outlined here.
There are two prevailing attitudes towards AI that I find troubling. The first is what I’m going to call the techbro attitude — AI is this magical machine that can do anything — we don’t need writers or programmers or artists anymore, because the computer can now take any prompt we give it and generate numerous drafts. We can train these machines to match a particular style of writing or visual art. We don’t need actors or talking heads because we have deepfake technology and can replace them with video-realistic avatars that look and sound almost like the real thing. You can be your own one-person movie studio or game studio or art house or whatever you want to create.
The second attitude is what I’m going to call the doomer attitude — the things being generated by AI are some combination of dangerous and garbage. There is no practical use for AI, and companies and entrepreneurs (run by the idiot techbros) are going to use it as a tool to scrape the contents of…
