The One-way Ticket to AI-ville

If AI hype were a train, people would be hanging off the edges, climbing atop the engine compartment & windmilling like Mr. Bean dancing at a club. The tracks are being laid every moment, and no one has any idea where it’s going. Is it Snowpiercer or the much nicer Polar Express?

Just like the internet & social media before it, this train is reshaping our world in ways we will only really understand in its wake. Part of it has to do with messaging. An artificial intelligence is supposed to be a non-human entity that can reason, problem-solve, observe and act without being handheld throughout the process.

What we call AI today is a series of complex mathematical operations that allow it to predict outputs based on the training data it has been fed. There is a certain level of independence, especially with agentic solutions that are daisy-chained automation blocks, but it’s violently far from developing a consciousness.

Its greatest value lies in pattern recognition, information retrieval, document summary, and making sense of large datasets. Think large detecting manufacturing defects in machine parts en masse, or medical analysis for the early identification of cancer. At the individual level, you can have a whitepaper summary ready-to-go without reading the whole thing, or ask it to help make an email more professional.

Corporations love it because it’s a force multiplier. For example, one person can build a complete sales funnel that doesn’t require much human input. Creative teams are using it to reduce the tedious parts of the job like rotoscoping, scaling content campaigns much faster than before. Some specialized roles become obsolete, but the profit margins soar.

So far, not a seismic shift. There may be a day where a single click can do your whole job, but for now human input and insight is still needed.  The waters become significantly muddier when you look at it from an average consumer’s point-of-view.

There’s a video doing the rounds on Facebook of a giraffe being rescued on a cliff-side using a crane. It’s AI-generated, yet looks almost real at first glance. The post has thousands of reactions & comments from accounts that largely seem fake.

Entire Instagram profiles are generated with fake pictures; a restaurant recently featured a love story between two of its employees as a running theme between food posts. It was a hit, except neither the restaurant nor the employees were real.

Beyond being an interesting social experiment & the obvious potential for misinformation & fraud in more sinister hands, incidents like these pose a threat to the existence of the web as a space to exchange ideas with actual people. Would YouTuber MKBHD still be himself if he used an AI avatar to appear in his videos? Would it matter to you? It’s an unsettling thought.

Take this a step further and the wheels really start to come off. AI can and is being used to generate songs, either sung ‘n the style of’, or entirely ‘original’ tracks. It’s not a stretch to imagine labels populating streaming platforms with AI musicians & earning all the revenue. Without even considering the legal ramifications, this is a minefield for artists who’re already shortchanged in the era of streaming.

As a listener/consumer, this becomes a slippery slope where the meaning & value of art becomes blurry. Maybe AI-augmentation will be the only way forward in the future, but at the moment, it feels unnatural, like a parent inventing a fantasy bedtime story using ChatGPT instead of their imagination.

One of the fundamental aspects of being a human is the ability to express yourself, to create and share that joy with others. AI is fantastic, especially in business. As we climb aboard the hype train, we just need to be careful not to leave too much of ourselves on it when it’s time to get off.