A Plea for Sober AI
October 23, 2024
So why is this hype bad? Why can’t we wallow in the promise of AI for a few days? What’s wrong with pretending these carefully managed demos aren’t casual one-take affairs?
The hype is so loud it washes out the true magic of these products.
Oddly, the best example of this is from another of those hype hangover articles, this time Julia Angwin’s piece in The New York Times Opinion section, “Press Pause on the Silicon Valley Hype Machine.” In it she writes:
The reality is that A.I. models can often prepare a decent first draft. But I find that when I use A.I., I have to spend almost as much time correcting and revising its output as it would have taken me to do the work myself.
Read that again. And again, until the absurdity of it sinks in.
We have software that can write a “decent first draft” in a few seconds, for free or for a few cents, and we’re disappointed.
Thanks to the constant hype – from OpenAI, Google, and countless other companies and boosters2 – we’re disappointed.
I think this captures well the limiting nature of AI hype.