147 - Can AI Fool YOU?

What Does A.I. and MTV’s Jersey Shore Have in Common? When feeling optimistic, I think A.I. will help humans become more discriminating consumers of information. For example, a teacher will learn to recognize the difference between an A.I. generated essay and one written by an actual human student. The first merely regurgitates text found elsewhere, while the human mind will make connections, inferences and conclusions. The quality of teaching will improve. But when I’m feeling pessimistic, I remember MTV’s Jersey Shore. At first, it appeared to be a joke, akin to a live action Beavis & Butthead. But soon, I was distressed to hear people taking it seriously. Our willingness to accept the antics of Pauly D, The Situation, Snooki and Jwoww appears to prove that we are not discriminating consumers of information. All too often, we are willing to accept whatever is served up and use that to reset our future expectations. If that thumbnail analysis is accurate, we best prepare for the new dark ages.

Adding my two cents to the discussion First of all, I agree with what Robert Brown and Gabe Monroe said above about this new technology: it is good at remixing and presenting existing ideas as new, but bland, content. For a creator seeking to produce innovative content, ChatGPT is a tool to discover the "obvious" facts about a topic; it can be used as a filter to de-prioritize the parts of a topic that are "common knowledge" so that more time and emphasis can be placed on adding something new to the conversation. Secondly, as dotails said, this technology is only going to get better over time. Those who are manually generating content to "chase the algorithm" will eventually fall behind algorithmically generated content. At some point there will be a media platform where the content is exclusively generated by an algorithm and customized to the viewer's preferences. Those who complain about how all Marvel superhero movies are formulaic will now be able to complain about the unlimited number of Marvel movies the new Disney++ will be cranking out.

Peter S