I believe the largest threat from AI in the coming years, possibly even decades, will not be that it will take over and turn humans into zoo animals. Rather, humans will overestimate its “intelligence” and use it to their own detriment.

This will mostly consist of companies and individuals putting too much faith in AI and making bad decisions because of it. E.g. company owners firing talent and trying to do with AI or individuals getting stuck in trying to create the perfect prompt when figuring out how to do it without AI would have been faster, or at least safer when talking about accuracy.

AI hallucinate, may require enormous amounts of compute without giving us correct answers, and the people doing AI don’t really know what they are doing.

So, do I say AI is useless and should not be used?

I think the Russians (yeah, those guys) say it best: Trust, but verify.

Do not take what comes out of an AI as gospel or truth. Or, as Qui-Gon Jinn said: The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.

One trick in order to think more clearly about AI is to drop the “I” (intelligence). Instead, you get “artificial content generators” (or “artificial decision makers”—just don’t mix “intelligence” in there and you’re ok):

• Artificial picture generator
• Artificial text generator
• Artificial music generator
• Etc.

I.e. more of a music box than a musician…

By all means, use GPTs or Image Checkpoints, but know that e.g. the text they generate are artificially generated and are neither fresh, original nor necessarily accurate.

However, right now there is a huge problem with AI in that the companies selling it steals copyrighted material with the insane notion that AI’s learning would be human level and this copying, rehashing and abusing of material would be something every human does when they learn something new.

Eh, they are not human! (Not even close.) Also, ok, so pay the price of one book per user that gains knowledge from that book then, or?

So, it could be good to not use AI too much before a satisfying model of payment to content creators have been put into place. After all, no content creators, no artificial content generators.