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2 hours agoI have a very good friend who is brilliant and has slogged away slowly shifting the sometimes-shitty politics of a swing state’s drug and alcohol and youth corrections policies from within. She is amazing, but she has a reading disorder and is a bit neuroatypical. Social niceties and honest emails that don’t piss her bosses or colleagues off are difficult for her. She jumped on ChatGPT to write her emails as soon is it was available, and has never looked back. It’s been a complete game changer for her. She no longer spends hours every week trying to craft emails that strike that just-right balance. She uses that time to do her job, now.
As some witty folks have put it, LLMs can’t give you anything truly, interestingly new when all they’re capable of is some weighted average of what’s already there. And I’ll be clear in saying I hate with the force of a tsunami the way AI is being shoved at us by desperate CEOs, and how it’s being used to kill labor, destroy copyright law, increase income inequality, destroy the environment, and increase the power of huge corporations headed by assholes like Altman and Musk. But AI is getting pretty good at that weighted-average-of-what’s-out-there, and a lot of the work done in several industries can benefit from that. For me, one of the great perversities or tragedies of AI is that it could be a targeted, useful tool but, instead, it’s a hammer to further erode freedom. Even the coders, editors, advertisers, educators, etc. using it to do their jobs are participating in a short-term selloff of their profession to their CEOs, shareholders, etc. at the expense of large numbers of their colleagues or potential colleagues who will now never get jobs.
It’s like if someone invented the wheel and Sam Altman immediately patented it and sold it to Raytheon.