rich 888 How Long Will A.I.’s ‘Slop’ Era Last?
rich 888 How Long Will A.I.’s ‘Slop’ Era Last?
Remember the season of A.I. doom? It wasn’t that long agorich 888, in the spring of last year, that the new chatbots were trailed by various “godfathers” of the technology, warning of existential risk; by researchers suggesting a 10 percent chance of human extinction at the hands of robots; by executives speculating about future investment rounds tabulated in the trillions.
Now the reckoning is happening on very different terms. In a note from Barclays, one analyst warned that today’s A.I. investments might be three times as large as expected returns, while another analyst, in several assessments published by Sequoia Capital, calculated that investments in A.I. were running short of projected profits by a margin of at least several hundred billion dollars annually. (He called this “A.I.’s $600 billion question” and warned of “investment incineration.”) In a similarly bearish Goldman Sachs report, the firm’s head of global equity research estimated that the cost of A.I. infrastructure build-out over the next several years would reach $1 trillion. “Replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed,” he noted. “The crucial question is: What $1 trillion problem will A.I. solve?”
A decade ago, venture capital provided Americans the “millennial lifestyle subsidy”: investors keeping the price of Uber and DoorDash and dozens of other services artificially low for years. Today the same millennial might read about that trillion-dollar A.I. expenditure, more than the United States spends annually on its military, and think: What exactly is that money going toward? What is A.I. even for?
One increasingly intuitive answer is “garbage.” The neuroscientist Erik Hoel has called it “A.I. pollution,” and the physicist Anthony Aguirre “something like noise” and “A.I.-generated dross.” More recently, it has inspired a more memorable neologistic term of revulsion, “A.I. slop”: often uncanny, frequently misleading material, now flooding web browsers and social-media platforms like spam in old inboxes. Years deep into national hysteria over the threat of internet misinformation pushed on us by bad actors, we’ve sleepwalked into a new internet in which meaningless, nonfactual slop is casually mass-produced and force-fed to us by A.I.
When Thomas Crooks tried to assassinate Donald Trump, for instance, X’s A.I. sputtered out a whole string of cartoonishly false trending topics, including that it was Kamala Harris who had been shot.
Where not long ago we used to find the very best results for Google searches, we can now find instead potentially plagiarized and often inaccurate paragraph summaries of answers to our queries — including, reportedly, that only 17 American presidents were white, that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that Andrew Johnson, who became president in 1865 and died in 1875, earned 13 college degrees between 1947 and 2012. We can also read that geologists advise eating at least one rock a day, that Elmer’s glue should be added to pizza sauce for thickening and that it’s completely chill to run with scissors.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.rich 888