I have a confession to make: I'm terribly sick of talking about generative AI. I know, I know, I edit op-eds for a tech magazine. This should be my bread and butter! But so much of the conversation around LLMs traffics in tropes I feel like I've heard a thousand times before. This technology is making us dumber. It's changing the world more quickly than we can even begin to understand. It's coming for our jobs!
As you can probably imagine, the WIRED archive is a great place to get a sense of how persistent these themes are. In 2012, for instance, Steven Levy wrote a feature titled, presciently, "Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?" The piece was a close look inside Narrative Science, a Chicago-based company training algorithms to write articles, among other things. But the goal, its founder assured an understandably skeptical Levy, wasn't to automate human writers out of the picture. "Instead the universe of newswriting will expand dramatically," he explained, "as computers mine vast troves of data to produce ultracheap, totally readable accounts of events, trends, and developments that no journalist is currently covering."
Obviously, it's hard not to read this with a dash of cynicism from the vantage point of 2023. For as many times as we've been over the existential issues raised by automation, I'd guess the question of how to live with—and not be edged out by—machines has largely become more fraught over time. But there's also something refreshing about how readily Levy accepts the company's mission at face value. His article is more concerned with understanding this new technology in all of its complexity than with hand-wringing or issuing verdicts about the ethical issues at play. Perhaps we'd do well to try adopting that attitude when we talk about generative AI.
This all makes me wonder: What technology, if any, feels existentially threatening to you? And how well do you understand it? Write me a note letting me know what you think, or leave a comment beneath Levy's story.
See you next week!
Eve
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