How much of the Artificial Intelligence hype is just hot air?

During an event held by Oracle in Singapore last month, I heard a speaker describe A.I as "aspirin looking for a headache". On the other hand, Linus Torvalds was rather less poetic as he described A.I, with characteristic bluntness, as "90% marketing and 10% reality".

The term "Artificial Intelligence" has infiltrated the public consciousness over the course of the past year. Tech products such as dating apps and search engines now boast A.I-powered features. Even Meta's WhatsApp now has Meta AI built in, for no discernible purpose whatsoever. The consensus seems to be that adding the term "A.I" to any product automatically raises its value in the eyes of consumers.

And sadly, they're right. Non-technical consumers tend to be a simple-minded bunch. On one hand, I feel like I should be outraged at this brazen exploitation of their gullibility. On the other hand, money needs to move in this economy, and if someone absolutely has to be parted from their money, it might as well be fools.

Shut up and take my money!

Is A.I even all that revolutionary at the moment? Back in March, Sam Altman declared that OpenAI had produced ChatGPT 4 which had enhanced reasoning abilities. This report tells us that ChatGPT 4 beats 90% of humans. If we take this to be true, does it then follow that all the "A.I-powered" features in other products up to now, have been bullshit?

As it turns out, very few people produce technology purely for the love of technology. It's a business like any other. And part of business, is hype. I can't go a day without seeing some ad for certification for A.I pop up on my screen. My feed is full of news as to how AI is going to disrupt the workforce. It's starting to feel like people want this to happen a lot more than A.I is actually capable of it. Because the perception of potentially huge profits, draws investors. Investors keep the money coming in. Few people have the patience to invest significantly in something that might be huge in a decade. However, if you can show progress now or soon, that's when the cash register sounds start ringing.

A.I up to now

Currently, at the very basic levels, A.I is being used in cheap entertainment. My Facebook feed is filled with the products of people amusing themselves with wacky A.I image or video generations. Walls of text are similarly generated through idle conversations with bots.

At work, generative A.I is used to rewrite paragraphs or even generate entirely new ones, in emails or in reports. Or create graphics for presentations. Even video. In short, nothing that wasn't possible before A.I.

The problem is, the content generated can't be implicitly trusted. And even assuming that it can, such content generation isn't anything remotely groundbreaking. Creating presentations? Rewriting paragraphs and emails and cover letters? Bluntly put, it's kids' stuff. Unless your command of the English language was terrible to begin with, this use of generative A.I won't increase quality of output. At best, the speed of which said output is produced, will increase tenfold. Quickly produced crap, however, is still crap.

When I first encountered ChatGPT, I regarded it as a fun new toy which could do amusing things like write poems, generate data about a known subject and make stuff up. And yes, even provide code for well-known algorithms. I certainly wasn't seeing ChatGPT as an equal, much less a threat to my professional existence.

The code generation capabilities were potentially interesting... but ultimately, nothing I couldn't accomplish with a Google search. And, of course, some judicious copy-pasting.

A.I in the military?

If one were into conspiracy theories, we could even entertain the idea that A.I is actually more advanced and being used by the military and secret organizations. The insipid content-generating version is the one that mere mortals like us are allowed to use, in order to distract us and lull us into a false sense of security. So while we're too busy using A.I to genderswap our favorite movie stars and making crappy deepfake porn, some people are doing exactly what they want.

Depressing thought, eh? Anyway...

A.I in the future

One question I keep getting asked is, will A.I replace humans? Are our jobs in danger? Are programmer jobs in danger? I don't know, man. You've seen the state of Generative A.I as it is now.

Text? We're talking about something that will cheerfully churn out chunks of text that looks reasonable but will probably not stand up to scrutiny. Just because something writes a lot of stuff in good English, doesn't mean the stuff is actually useful.

Images? You mean the art generators that keep rendering human hands with entirely too many fingers? The amount of effort it takes just to generate one useful image (which can never be replicated) is off-putting unless you're just doing it for recreational purposes. As for video, forget about Sora and its ilk replacing actors and film directors. The observations I made about art generators above, applies here, too.

If you can be replaced at your job by technology that produces such unusable rubbish, perhaps A.I isn't the problem. Perhaps the problem is that your job is so repetitive and needs so little human ingenuity that a machine could do it, and do it a million times faster.

The other possible problem, in the case of artists and writers, is that consumers are Phillistines and don't require content to be all that good. They're happy with sucky A.I generated monstrosities, as was the case recently when a local artist's work was plagiarised with A.I. 

This is not to say that A.I will not eventually replace us. "Eventually" being the operative word. For this to happen, A.I would have to hit some kind of critical point. Self-programming? Learning new logic instead of simply adding data to its memory? Actual creativity instead of merely approximating existing data from human beings?

And the golden question: When will this happen?

I don't know the answer to that question. No one does. There are too many possibilities. It could happen a hundred years from now. Or fifty. It could happen next week, or even after breakfast tomorrow. The only thing that's clear is, in its current form, A.I is not even remotely close to being an average human replacement. However, once it arrives at that critical point, not only will A.I have that human spark, it will have the speed gifted to it by technology. As to what would happen next, use your imagination.

In King Arthur's
Court.

This reminds me of a novel I once read, by Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In the story, Hank Morgan time travels and finds himself in Camelot, making the acquiantance of the likes of Arthur, Merlin and Lancelot. The medieval English are initially hostile, but Morgan has a gun on him, and uses it to devastating effect. To the people of these times, this looks like powerful magic even though to us it's just, you know, a gun. They end up worshipping him as some kind of great wizard while Merlin looks jealously on.

Because, as we know, technology that is sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.

Just for readers who are terrible with analogies, here are several parallels I can draw from that story to this situation. Generative A.I looks like the gun. The promoters of A.I technology such as Jensen Huang and Sam Altman, are Hank Morgan. And the rubes gushing about how transformative this new technology is, are, tragically, those primitive and technologically backward Englishmen.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence may or may not be increasing in actual technological depth, but its mentions are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, if not its actual usage. Time will tell if all this is smoke and mirrors.

Right now, with all the hype, A.I doesn't actually need to be that good in order to gain traction. Perception is a huge part of this. As long as there are rubes around willing to uncritically swallow what the snake oil peddlers are selling, there'll be enough goodwill to carry it. But even that goodwill is going to run out at some point. By that time, let's see if A.I has made any actual progress.

Maybe all these people who are hyping this up, who don't appear to have ever written a single line of code in their lives, are seeing something I'm not. I remain open to the possibility that I'm wrong about this. I want to be wrong about this. It would be beyond exciting if so.

Artificial regards,
T___T