AI Dreams Come True
All these are, more or less, prescient:
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The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
— Adams, Douglas (1987) Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. William Heinemann Ltd., London source
Somewhere, right now, a report written by an AI (to save a human the labour of writing it) is being summarised by an AI (to save a human the labour of reading it).
In The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer is an AI “book” designed to teach and guide a child (adjusting its lessons to the child’s circumstances and age). It sometimes patches in human voice actors working in on-demand call centres to read its generated content, thus giving its stories a gloss of humanity.
These copywriters are being paid to rewrite AI-generated content to sound more human.
Right now, we’re tragedy-of-the-commons-ing the entire internet into something akin to the Vile Offspring from Charlie Stross’ Accelerando. I suspect that long-term the answer’s going to be the same, too - human communication retreats to walled gardens, abandoning the public internet to the AIs.
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— Star Trek: The Next Generation S04E18 Identity Crisis (1991) source
This is my favourite, because it’s far more hopeful. This is what my very first experiences with using chatbots to write code felt like. I guess the problem’s not the tool, it’s the users.