Back in the early days of the LLM boom (maybe 2 years ago) I heard someone on a podcast call these "perpetual B-minus machines." In other words, if you give it a task, a hypothetical examiner would probably give it a B-minus.
Of course, you could argue that in certain fields it's gotten vastly better or always was quite good, but I think the statement still holds true. It's basically quite good at many things but always massively dragging behind a human expect. As a writer, there will be fewer opportunities to get paid work because AI can write crappy articles quickly and for free, but then it will never be able to do the deep research in offline archives that's required to write in-depth essays.
It'll be interesting over the next years seeing not just how it develops but how we develop in response. I like your optimism at the end... I'm not sure I agree but I certainly hope you're right and it is possible that it could help us break out of this cultural funk.
I think even if it does become a much better writer in all possible circumstances (which seems quite possible at this point), people will still be interested in what other humans have to say. But for this to hold true, we have to make sure we stay interesting. If we all become complacent because of technology and stop traveling, stop reading, stop having weird religious experiences, stop forming rock bands, stop doing drugs and having sex... Then the chatbots may have the ultimate edge on human creators. So we gotta stay weird!
Back in the early days of the LLM boom (maybe 2 years ago) I heard someone on a podcast call these "perpetual B-minus machines." In other words, if you give it a task, a hypothetical examiner would probably give it a B-minus.
Of course, you could argue that in certain fields it's gotten vastly better or always was quite good, but I think the statement still holds true. It's basically quite good at many things but always massively dragging behind a human expect. As a writer, there will be fewer opportunities to get paid work because AI can write crappy articles quickly and for free, but then it will never be able to do the deep research in offline archives that's required to write in-depth essays.
It'll be interesting over the next years seeing not just how it develops but how we develop in response. I like your optimism at the end... I'm not sure I agree but I certainly hope you're right and it is possible that it could help us break out of this cultural funk.
I think even if it does become a much better writer in all possible circumstances (which seems quite possible at this point), people will still be interested in what other humans have to say. But for this to hold true, we have to make sure we stay interesting. If we all become complacent because of technology and stop traveling, stop reading, stop having weird religious experiences, stop forming rock bands, stop doing drugs and having sex... Then the chatbots may have the ultimate edge on human creators. So we gotta stay weird!