Ai Is A Mass-delusion Event - The Atlantic

Presumably you have seen this Atlantic piece on AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event from Charlie Warzel. If you've only seen the headline and not dug in, now's a great time. The majority of the article runs through some hand wringing about the future we are building or, rather, having built for us by tech giants. Overall, it summarizes a great deal of the meaningful concerns that the technologically aware have and expresses them quite eloquently.

I consider myself "Pro AI" in general but not without plenty of concerns for how it is being used, how it is being regulated and where it may be headed. Put more eloquently by Warzel:

This is the AI era in a nutshell. Squint one way, and you can portray it as the saving grace of the world economy. Look at it more closely, and it’s a ticking time bomb lodged in the global financial system. The conversation is always polarized. Keep the faith.

The summation of the piece focuses on the shakiness of LLM responses and how quick tech companies are to force this Good Enough response down our throats. Hallucinations, Sycophantic Agreeability or just Ill Informed Responses are the norm and there's no lever to force improvement - only general market competition (which is sufficient at the moment).

I think we've all done ourselves a disservice by conflating "LLM's" with the general term "AI" - as one is a subset of the other. I'm no masterful thinker on this topic but AI has a lot of room to grow, LLM's may be hitting a ceiling. That's okay.

We just need a way to hold companies accountable for the Good Enough issue. Not sure what that looks like but it's gotta be something rather than nothing.