Ed Zitron: Degenerative AI

[Nevilledog]

https://ez.substack.com/p/degenerative-ai


In an attempt to catch up with Google, a company that has successfully destroyed its popular search product through sheer force of greed, Microsoft invested a further $10 billion in ChatGPT creator OpenAI (six days after laying off 10,000 people), hoping to make its own search engine Bing better, or more popular, but certainly not more profitable. The net result is a search engine with narcissistic personality disorder, responding to user queries with emotionally manipulative and outright false claims.

I Do Not Know What You Are Talking About, Man!

If you haven’t been keeping up with this stuff, the latest goldrush in technology is in ‘generative AI,’ meaning in broad terms that an artificial intelligence “generates” content as a result of a user’s input. ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, is the largest and most popular. Companies can use the API - a way of connecting one application to another - to power their own products.

For example, there are generative AIs that can create images, or write articles about subjects, all from a user prompt. You can say “write me 1000 words on where the finest crumpets are found” into ChatGPT, and it will produce 1000 words on that subject. Stable Diffusion does the same thing with images - you can ask it to, say, make a watercolor painting of a duck with a Remington shotgun, and it will do its best to create it.

To do so, these products are “trained” on datasets, creating massive issues of bias and copyright infringement, because these generative AIs have to learn to construct whatever they’re generating from somewhere. Because, ultimately, these products are inherently learning from other people’s work.

The problem with these AI-powered search engines is that they do not have consistent results. Both Google’s Bard AI and Bing AI had obvious errors in their first demos, largely in part because they are, from what I can tell, making their best guess every time. As a result, Bing couldn’t tell the difference between a cordless or corded vacuum cleaner, or correctly interpret financial reports - tasks that one would not expect Bing or Google to do, unless the CEOs of both companies made statements about them being able to do so and then showed the world them trying to do so in a demo for the press.

In a vacuum, these are minor errors. They are obvious problems that could be overshadowed by how cool it is that an AI can do this. But when put in the context of “this is how search engines are going to work going forward,” they are absolutely fucking ridiculous.

The point of a search engine is that you are searching for something, such as a solution to a problem or the location of something. The results - though manipulated to extract as much capital out of the user as possible - were never truly positioned as “answers.” You, the user, chose what was “right” in your results. The search engine offered ideas but not conclusions, meaning that while manipulations were possible (and quite common!), these engines were rarely prescriptive.

*snip*