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Sadly, I think this person is wrong, but not for straightforward reasons. The fact is, that attention is limited, and you can grab a large swath of that attent

Sadly, I think this person is wrong, but not for straightforward reasons. The fact is, that attention is limited, and you can grab a large swath of that attention with crap, just look at like Netflix's entire context strategy, which used to be about prestige drama and now is just about throwing as much content at the wall to see what sticks, and with micro-targeting and an unlimited amount of AI generated content, that's a lot less $$ for "good" content. He kinda says it in the piece: "This pattern repeats. It’s not that AI can’t be helpful in talking about humanities concepts. If the level of understanding you’re looking for is high school or maybe undergraduate, these tools can teach you a lot, and for a lot of people, that’s more than enough. But if your aim is graduate level analysis and output—a level surely included in “almost all cognitive tasks a human can do”—you’re going to quickly be led astray." The whole world is moving towards high school and maybe undergraduate levels of doing things, if that. Most business tasks can probably be handled by someone with a high school education, certainly by an undergraduate education. But like, I want to live in the world Aaron Ross Powell seems to live in, but this article has not convinced me that we do.

AaronRossPowell 2y ago
I don't think any of this is incompatible with the argument I made in the essay. This paragraph speaks to it: The same holds for art. AI can, right now, produce pretty passable mediocre art. Which is a threat to plenty of artists, writers, etc., because plenty of artists, writers, etc., produce mediocre art. I’m pretty confident existing frontier LLM models could come up with an episode of the ABC drama 9-1-1 indistinguishable from the output of that show’s writing room. But, again, “almost all cognitive tasks a human can do” aims a bit higher than 9-1-1. So the claim I'm making isn't "AI can't generate art that satisfies many or most people." Rather it's that Roose is wrong to believe it is capable, or will become capable, of "almost all cognitive tasks a human can do," which is a different standard. That lots of people are happy to accept less than the best doesn't mean that something that is capable only of achieving that less-than-the-best level is actually capable of achieving the best. It just means that lots of people are happy to accept less than the best.
- techpineapple 2y ago
  Maybe this will bifurcate business strategies. Maybe "almost all human cognitive tasks" describes breadth not depth, that it can only do 20% of the things that humans as a whole are capable of, but humans as a whole spend 80% of their time on the easiest 20%, and that you can re-engineer your business without it. We kinda see that with outsourcing and other strategies that have downsides in terms of maybe longevity of employees that can lead to brain drain. But really, I'd much rather be wrong :-) So, thanks for your submission!
tim333 2y ago
>attention is limited, and you can grab a large swath of that attention with crap I think that's kind of wrong. If attention is limited then there will be a lot of things competing for it and getting a large swath is hard. Thinking of people I know, I've got a friend trying to make it with AI music and getting nowhere because the songs are generic and boring. On the other hand I ran into a guy who wrote an unusually catchy bit of music which was put out as Hey Kitty which went nowhere, then covered as Hey Mickey which was no 1 many places and then kind of copied into APT which has been "#1 global top music video" for months according to youtube. It works because it's different and catchy unlike AI crap.

AaronRossPowell 2y ago

I don't think any of this is incompatible with the argument I made in the essay. This paragraph speaks to it: The same holds for art. AI can, right now, produce pretty passable mediocre art. Which is a threat to plenty of artists, writers, etc., because plenty of artists, writers, etc., produce mediocre art. I’m pretty confident existing frontier LLM models could come up with an episode of the ABC drama 9-1-1 indistinguishable from the output of that show’s writing room. But, again, “almost all cognitive tasks a human can do” aims a bit higher than 9-1-1. So the claim I'm making isn't "AI can't generate art that satisfies many or most people." Rather it's that Roose is wrong to believe it is capable, or will become capable, of "almost all cognitive tasks a human can do," which is a different standard. That lots of people are happy to accept less than the best doesn't mean that something that is capable only of achieving that less-than-the-best level is actually capable of achieving the best. It just means that lots of people are happy to accept less than the best.

techpineapple 2y ago
Maybe this will bifurcate business strategies. Maybe "almost all human cognitive tasks" describes breadth not depth, that it can only do 20% of the things that humans as a whole are capable of, but humans as a whole spend 80% of their time on the easiest 20%, and that you can re-engineer your business without it. We kinda see that with outsourcing and other strategies that have downsides in terms of maybe longevity of employees that can lead to brain drain. But really, I'd much rather be wrong :-) So, thanks for your submission!

tim333 2y ago

>attention is limited, and you can grab a large swath of that attention with crap I think that's kind of wrong. If attention is limited then there will be a lot of things competing for it and getting a large swath is hard. Thinking of people I know, I've got a friend trying to make it with AI music and getting nowhere because the songs are generic and boring. On the other hand I ran into a guy who wrote an unusually catchy bit of music which was put out as Hey Kitty which went nowhere, then covered as Hey Mickey which was no 1 many places and then kind of copied into APT which has been "#1 global top music video" for months according to youtube. It works because it's different and catchy unlike AI crap.