I am changing, evolving, adapting. There are creative factors, plant factors, mindfulness awareness of my energy and focus. I greet the day with curiosity and a sense of adventure. Even if my path today shoves me back into my cashier job for eight hours. Uh.
I’ve got some motivated interviewers, but no one is in a hurry. One, if I make it to the next round (I’ve been on hold for two weeks so far) will be at least two follow-on interviews including a panel interview in the final round. I’m fighting and courting AI at the same time. Take this spelling bot, Grammarly.
Let’s just call it stupid AI. No, I don’t need a serial comma in a six-word sentence. And your premium AI-assist features show just how dumb “next best work” pattern matching, the magic behind AI’s writing transformations. It is going to dumb down any creativity I have written. I don’t want everything to follow the rules, the logic according to English Grammar 101. I want human creativity. Expression that pulls from my vast living language model now running for just over sixty-two years. I don’t need help making my writing more proper or formal. I want to break Grammarly’s suggestions about half the time. But when it’s right, it’s right.
So, AI giants pour billions in to data centers and Nvidia chips. The cost of power and cooling is about to require nuclear power. AI is evolving us in dangerous and stupid ways. In the end, five or six companies are going to own the AI superpowers, and the cost is going to rise until only the businesses with expense budgets in the millions are going to be able to afford the latest model.
All this power, however, is not making the AI more intelligent. Faster, yes. Cheaper, yes, for now. And of all the billions being tossed on the AI bonfire only ONE AI PLATFORM IS MAKING MONEY. Barely. The burn rate on all of the AI platforms is exponentially higher than their revenue. Only ChatGPT is winning, with over 40% of the AI market. Also-rans like Grok, and Meta’s Llama are struggling to get 1 – 3 % of their share. Their expenses are not going down; they are going up.
I’m not rushing to keep up with AI, but I am using AI to talk about AI. In some form of recursive art, I am feeding AI back into AI and asking AI to summarize, interpret, and even build timelings and explainer videos of the results. I can’t tell you my latest AI con, but it’s a big one as my YouTube subscriber base heads toward twenty thousand for a second time. Even this costs me money.
Here’s the rub. With 20,000 subscribers, only 1% of all views are generated from organic (unpaid) reach. And I’m not going to tell you that each subscriber costs about a dollar in advertising. Each. This is unsustainable for me. Even if I create five videos a day, blasted (theoretically to all 20,000 of my “subscribers”) I’m getting 10 – 30 views. Total.
Even putting $20 into advertising raises this number, but generates only 20 new subscribers. I’m not telling you this, but I paid for every single subscriber. And the idea of becoming a paid YouTube content producer. With 19,000+ subscribers, I’m 3% of the way closer to becoming a YouTube earner rather than an advertiser. I’m a content producer who is paying to get my work shown to my subscribers. What started with Facebook reducing the “friends” reach to 1% has infected all platforms. If you’re paying for reach, how much money do you have to spend to become a haloed YouTube Influencer? Only 900% more than I’m spending now. With no guarantee that my results are going to pay off. Is my content likely to go VIRAL? No.
The industry lighting our planet on fire says “General Intelligence” is nearly achieved. We all know Elon Musk lies. This myth of the AI waking up and becoming self-directed, self-aware, is far fetched and perhaps impossible. It’s why AI music is good until the synth singer starts. The blurry, breathy styles of pop music at this moment is not helping. The music is so dumbed down Taylor Swift songs without her voice don’t register as copyrighted music. It’s GENERIC. It’s NEXT NOTE COMPOSING.
A human mind, a large living language model, is greater than the sum of all LLMs yet created. There is ZERO comprehension of the math AI is running. Next word or next pixel, there is no life, no soul in the machine. AI is spewing patterns swizzled from the best patterns in history and it can’t write a poem about the love of a cat. Of course it can, but it sounds something like the Happy Kitty song from Big Bang Theory.
AI can mimic the style of a painter (Van Gogh for example, or “in the style of starry starry night.”) Can reswizzle the style and keywords of Gonzo journalism and yet not create a single original idea. I can doesn’t generate ideas, it repeats patterns. Patterns it does not comprehend. What is death to an AI? What are the consequences of wrong answers or hallucinations by AI? If Musk’s self-driving AI kills a pedestrian, who is at fault? Tesla? The driver? AI? The pedestrian for not being in a crosswalk?
We’re not getting closer to AGI (artificial general intelligence) we’re getting dumber and less focused on the real gap. There is no human knowledge. AI cannot comprehend the real world. If you ask AI about world wars, it can list them, give you staggering loss statistics. AI cannot comprehend the pain of Platoon or Apocalypse Now. A death. A thousand deaths. To AI there is no difference. No feeling.
We occasionally refer to it as a soul, but AI is nowhere near becoming self-aware. Look at Grammarly, certainly not cutting-edge AI, but it’s been working for 10 years or more, and it’s no better at staying in its lane. I have turned off all grammar suggestions; it was just a constant fight. And the paid “enhancement” function liked to highlight significant style suggestions until you dismissed the sales pitch for upgrading to Grammarly pro. Nope.
For now, AI is a novel tool. For data mining and analysis, it’s changing the world of work and science. As far as getting smarter, no, it’s getting dumber. People are feeding it questions about better Tik Tok videos. “How to go viral.”
I don’t really pay attention to much of the AI-generated content I create. I listen to the AI podcast I prompt to life. I watch the explainer videos, digesting and presenting a new AI article from the New York Times. I’m not that interested in what AI has to say. I’m certainly not giving it any creative capacity inside my writing space.
