Play is a path to discovery. There's a lot of hype and vaporware in AI these days. There's also some real value there, but I'm not sure we've really figured out what the real value propositions are. I strongly suspect the inherent limitations in AI means that many of the current applications are doomed to failure. Playing with AI will give people a better internalized sense of the strengths and weaknesses, and it will do that broadly in ways that will let more people with more problems recognize when these tools can actually help them. The real problem we have today is that most people just don't really have a good intuition for that.
I'll save you the time of this garbage hot take. He is saying that AI will produce a lot of content...thus leading to time wasted (memes, funny stuff, lame stuff, pictures, etc). that is all. that's the entire article.
Seems a lot of people are taking this as some kind of slight against AI. My read was just that the tech has (obviously) a lot of time wasting potential as people play with it and that that's likely to make it more lasting than something purely utilitarian. This checks out to me. The obvious reason current "AI" is so popular is because everyone can play with it and get results they understand. It was a lot less fun doing MNIST classifier tutorials.
The article itself isn't actually dunking on AI, the title is a (kinda clever) clickbait.<p>If you actually read it, the author uses image gen models and such <i>a lot</i>, and is opining on how technology that allows us to tinker and "waste time" can be more impactful than technology that is simply "productive."
In the coming months, all these idiotic hot takes are going to get washed away by the raging sea of value transformation that is generative AI. No one will even have the strength to stand up in the surf to blabber on like this. The amount of naive reactive denialism is embarrassing.
"As you go through life, take time to monetize the roses."<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/issue-cartoons/cartoons-september-8-2014-issue" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/issue-cartoons/cartoons-s...</a>