Wednesday, February 15, 2023

A.I. as a path towards mass lunacy

MindBlog wants to be part of the passing on of this elegantly stated clip from an article by novelist, literary critic, and essayist Walter Kirn:
What chatbots do is scrape the web, the library of texts already written, and learn from it how to add to the collection, which causes them to start scraping their own work in ever enlarging quantities, along with the texts produced by future humans. Both sets of documents will then degenerate. For as the adoption of A.I. relieves people of their verbal and mental powers and pushes them toward an echoing conformity, much as the mass adoption of map apps have abolished their senses of direction, the human writings from which the A.I. draws will decline in originality and quality along with their derivatives. Enmeshed, dependent, mutually enslaved, machine and man will unite their special weaknesses — lack of feeling and lack of sense — and spawn a thing of perfect lunacy, like the child of a psychopath and an idiot.
I can hear the objections to this dire scenario of a million gung-ho programmers as well as the ambitious A.I. itself, but I, a creative writer, am wed to it. I think dramatically first and scientifically second, such is my art. My ancient and possibly endangered art is imagining worst cases and playing them out to their bitter, tragic ends, as Sophocles did when he posited a king who unwittingly killed his father, married his mother, and then launched an inquiry into the matter after vowing to slay the perpetrator. See? See what writers were capable of then?
Now we have ‘Ant-Man.’ And worse, ‘Ant-Man’ sequels, enhanced by C.G.I.

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