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Machine learning is easily the most amazing technology I've witnessed in 50 years. AI is advancing so fast, and I'm not 100% sure where the public pulse is on this one. Has it swung fully into raw hatred? There's good reason for that. But it's also here, and getting astonishingly good.

It's a very promising tool that can be used by professionals to cut down a lot of tedious busywork - unfortunately, those in power are pushing it as a tool to cut down on professionals; to replace skilled work with auto-generated slop to maximise profit by minimising the expense of skilled creators.

I'm not convinced that you will ever get something truly meaningful without the guiding hand of a skilled creative - the AI can't think or feel; it can't have original ideas; it can only regurgitate what it has been fed. I worry, however, that that low-quality slop will be pushed for normalisation.

There is also the problem that it is running out of data to be trained on. They've had to delay rolling out new model versions because it's hitting a wall. Once GenAI reaches its limit on being able to steal original works it will have to cannibalize its own slop creating a feedback loop of trash.

Hey Nate! I think that bottleneck is only meaningful if there aren't advances in how data is processed, but "more data" is only one lever for advancing AI. Certainly humans can grow intellectually without nearly as much input, and it's just a matter of time before that's solved for computers.

I agree -- not convinced of that either. But I also think there's a world of utility that either doesn't require those traits, or an approximation is good enough. It's profoundly useful for programming, for instance, or learning new software tools/languages.

But I'm also not 100% sure it won't cross some threshold where it's advanced regurgitation is indistinguishable from passion or creativity. If AI can pass the Turing test when it comes to writing and speaking, maybe it's just a matter of time before it gets it right and we're fooled/convinced.