Is AI fact or fiction? Yes.
I admit that all these tech hype cycles have been exhausting. As a now-former employee of the tech sector, freshly relieved of duties, I’ve had a front-row seat to Big Tech’s response to each new wave of potentially life-altering technology.
It’s understandable that most folks might have tuned out somewhere between news of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), bitcoins, and metaverses booming and busting all over their social feeds. Most of those have been obnoxiously over-hyped.
Now, Artificial Intelligence - or more specifically, Generative AI - takes center stage. This one is unlike the fleeting trends of Bored Ape NFTs selling for millions, or Mark Zuckerberg’s radical metaverse. Generative AI promises (and threatens) to more profoundly reshape our world.
But before we dive into the potential future, let's unpack Generative AI as a concept.
Generative AI is an umbrella term that refers to algorithms that can create new content. Specifically, content like text, images, music, or even entire videos.
In fact, as you read, please note that bold-italic text represents surviving novel ChatGPT-generated passages - not to mention every image in this article.
We should all be familiar with the concept of algorithms serving up existing content:
Google search algorithms
Social and news feed algorithms
Related TV shows and up-next algorithms
Spotify’s entire music platform is built around cultivating music to fit your data-driven interests.
All these simple incarnations of Artificial Intelligence only serve up existing content.
Now, with Generative AI, all that personalized information, once used to serve relevant existing information, can be the context used to generate brand new content to be spun up to keep your attention. This means that machines learn from existing data and now use that knowledge to produce something entirely new - from crunching numbers to creating art, literature, even entire TV channels.
Does GenAI steal from existing work?
The most straightforward answer I can give at this moment is that we just don’t know yet.
Multiple court cases are underway that will help give some legal precedent to set foundational context. Currently, the most high profile case is NYT vs OpenAI. The case isn’t very cut and dry, but thankfully Generative AI is fantastic at summarization. Please enjoy a brief overview of this ongoing legal battle, courtesy of Perplexity.ai.
The way these systems digest information when training the foundational AI models is very similar to how a human learns about a subject. Generalization, summarization and categorization of training data is really all that’s left from the original content. The actual trove of information would be far too big to keep at top of mind for any LLM (Large Language Model) or human, for that matter.
I’d describe GenAI’s outputs as a techno-collage – complex mosaics of colors, concepts, ideas, perspectives, decades of culture and style – distilled and recontextualized.
Using this definition, there’s strong potential for GenAI’s output to be classified as unique works deserving of copyright.
The other major question…. Will it take my job?
Generative AI is surprising everyone - even those who invented it. Novel knowledge emerges from making connections between points of massive amounts of data. This means the AI can think new thoughts, reach conclusions, and generate novel insights that aren’t included in its original training data.
So, yes, that is to say that Generative AI is proving to be quite capable of automating remarkably complex tasks. Many of those same tasks that would make up most, if not all, of just about anyone’s job duties.
The worry for some, and expectation for others, is that AI will take over both manual labor as well as white-collar jobs.
The Industrial Revolution's impact on manual labor by automated machines led to massive social and economic upheavals. The transition was painful and chaotic, but also created entirely new job sectors.
Fast forward to the present, and we're facing a similar disruption. AI is capable of performing tasks that were quite recently the sole domain of humans—data analysis, customer service, even content creation.
Clerical tasks, administrative departments, bookkeeping, HR, marketing, even sales departments are at risk of complete automation! There just aren’t many tasks performed in these departments that couldn’t be automated through a series of Generative AI tools.
So businesses will learn to do more with less – most will hire fewer people moving forward and dismiss any further need for entry level positions.
But, doesn’t GenAI lie sometimes?
It does. These errors are called hallucinations, so calling them lies might make them sound a bit more deceptive than they are. The nature of generating an output usually requires the AI to thrust one foot in front of the other, word after word, until it’s completed its response.
Speaking extemporaneously and with conviction about any prompted subject is how LLMs function. Needless to say, some outputs won’t pass the sniff test. Those rates are drastically decreasing with each iterative release, but there’s always going to be a non-zero chance that the machine is lying to you.
However, the gains to business productivity that AI promises are too great, even with the occasional whoopsie. After all, we’ve trusted people to do all the jobs, and look at what a mess we’ve made of this place.
My greatest fear is how we decide to adopt this technology into our existing workflows. Perhaps a human in a position of power relies on the wisdom of this sage machine to make consequential decisions. A hallucination with this context could become a life-or-death error. And, with that said, it should come as no surprise that the healthcare insurance industry is adopting AI to replace humans in the wake of turbulent layoffs.
Is this giving you a vision of a hellish future of weaponized bureaucracy with no oversight, no insight, and no recourse? …you’re not alone.
The sobering reality is the jobs market will continue to restrict. We’ll go from conventional employment agreements to a market filled with patchworking, hopscotching, enterprising individuals.
We’ve seen glimmers of it in the so-called gig economy, but those examples were just gigs in employment’s clothing with centralized owners of distribution and dispatch having complete command over work performed. That’s not where we’re headed. What comes next is chaotic and disruptive, but ultimately empowering.
New jobs, new opportunities, new livelihoods are all waiting for us to create them.
This transformation will feel abrupt – and uncomfortable – but we’ve been uncomfortable for ages now. We’re built for this.
We’ll need to reskill. Thankfully, that’s as simple as using a friendly conversational interface.
My advice? Talk to it.
We must also choose to accept GenAI as an ally instead of an intruder. It may not come to take our current jobs, but someone using it just might.
Adopting GenAI into our lives, understanding its uses and limitations will give us a chance to live more vibrantly - communicate more clearly - understand and be understood without delay. The interpersonal potential of Generative AI is vast and largely untapped. From revolutionizing creative processes to solving complex global tensions, its applications are endless.
The story of AI doesn’t have to remain one of tech giants cutting jobs with cutting-edge research. It can be a story of human ingenuity and the individual’s quest to push collective boundaries.
Charles Wilke is a Senior Writer and Content Developer living in Omaha, NE.
Blazing a path across industries – from video game development to content marketing, from theater production to digital guidance – he’s now chosen to adopt Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) as an ally instead of an intruder.
His twenty-year career remains focused on developing meaningful experiences across mediums. He's learned what matters most is how we make others feel as we grace their path. That's why he prioritizes work that creates consequential contact with others. Follow his exploration into co-creation at charleswilke.io