This Reddit post caught my imagination. The question was longer but the short version was
What is your perspective on the value of today’s AI, do you consider it to be an important step or merely an impressive and limited range of tools?
here is what I’ve been thinking about
As an educator I am part of the sceptical discussion. How will we teach students to think when their busy schedules is combined with access to easy solutions. It’s not that they don’t want to learn but we miss the point – your GPA should be an indication of your ability to think critically but it has become the end goal instead.
BUT then there is the usefulness of the tools. In one way they are a form of democratization (I realize how pompous it sounds but hear me out a bit)
Could humans do what AI is doing, and probably better? Absolutely. No matter how good AI gets the versatility of humans is always going to be better. But do we have access to these humans?
I can read all my cook books and create recipes for the week, or I can get AI to suggest a menu and edit it. I can go to the doctor and ask multiple questions about my health IF they give me enough time and I know what to ask. With AI I feed my data in and can interrogate it by asking multiple questions. I can get a personal trainer to make me a program but that’s another cost. Redesigning my shitty website (I am not a coder, and it’s not worth paying anyone), questioning about taxes, asking questions on basically any topic… Of course humans are better, Reddit discussions are a close second (sometimes they are first) but if the option is the open internet and AI? Then AI wins hands down.
The early internet had the same thing. There was an overabundance of optimism about how the internet was going to democratize everything from media to politics. It did not. But it did give us the possibility to do many things we could not do before – including have this discussion.
Much like the early internet we are currently in the “exciting’ phase. It will get worse. It will as Doctorow writes become enshittified. So enjoy the tools now, because quicker than we think, once they have become inevitable, the corporations that control them will begin aggressively injecting advertising and skewing the answers to suit their politics.