11/27/2023

AI and the Rise of Mediocrity

AI thrives when our need for originality is low

Like most Americans, I like to think of myself as an individual—but a week ago, I walked out into a parking lot to find five cars identical in make, model, year and color to my own. I was glad I remembered my license plate number, and that my key fob would (hopefully) only unlock the correct vehicle.

A few days later, I found myself in a grocery checkout line, skimming through yet another article in which the writer touted the wonders of "artificial intelligence" and fretted hazily over whether we are nearing the point when AI will be able to produce novels, films and other creative work, effectively replacing us. When I looked up and over to other people in the line, half of them wore the same shoe brand as me.

The truth is that there is no such thing as "artificial intelligence." ChatGPT, Midjourney and the like are not conscious, intelligent minds. As sophisticated as they are, they are only language and image models fed with the results of human innovation scraped and stolen from the internet. Having analyzed what we have written or depicted before, these programs then statistically anticipate what the next most likely word in a sentence should be, or what color the next pixel in an image should be.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.