I have been struggling to reconcile AI’s place in our lives and its existence threaded throughout the internet.
While the masses have been flocking to capture the free abundance creator of chatGPT, I’ve been hesitant and have been debating the pros and cons in close circles of friends.
After reading this article, it’s clear that I am not the only one concerned and conflicted. This is my view of the world:
- Technology evolves societies. The creation of the internet was a significant leapfrog for humanity, connecting people from near and far and creating a shared place in the world for humans to create things.
- Companies grew where people gathered. Focused on scale and growth, companies paid for elaborate experiences that attracted people to their spot on the internet, engaged them with interactions and human-to-human generated content, then made money.
- Growth was limited to people. Revenue was the north star. So companies chased the dollars, and dollars came from the masses, which meant that scalability was the most important quality of an internet company. Humans have limits, but with AI companies can scale infinitely faster and cheaper with AI-generated content, code, and agents. In theory, it makes sense.
- Everyone loves a good shortcut. The problem simply is that not everyone who generates blogs, code, or anything else on the internet is ACTUALLY trained to do that. We all take shortcuts. For example, most people who write blogs are not trained as journalists. What that means is they cut corners to create content and don’t check every detail for accuracy.
- Trash in and trash out. Compounded on this then is that AI-systems including google’s baird and openAI’s chatgpt are trained on this inaccurate human-generated content and jumbled together with “their” understanding of the context, the output of the machine fluent, readable content that seems real enough, but is actually subtly wrong.
- Invisible defects. An average internet user can’t tell the difference between reading something accurate or inaccurate. Also, they can’t decipher if the content was written by a human or a machine.
- Misinformation mania. This results in the new reality of low-quality, inaccurate content (i.e. misinformation). Humans act on what they consume, and unfortunately, that content they consume has a high chance of being wrong.
- It’s not their fault. People don’t know what they don’t know. The average internet user wants to solve their problem so they search. Yet without them knowing the validity of the information this inherent trust leads to significant risk for society.
I can’t say I am surprised that we have arrived here, but I am worried about where we are headed. It seems like the entire internet as we know it is crumbling before our feet.
There is a significant shift in how we create and I believe in the value that generative AI and AI has to support humanity, yet the “new web” is struggling to find itself and figure out who it wants to be when it grows up.