Katherine Dee in Tablet:
We’re supposedly on the brink of an artificial intelligence breakthrough. The bots are already communicating—at least they’re stringing together words and creating images. Some of those images are even kind of cool, especially if you’re into that sophomore dorm room surrealist aesthetic. GPT-3, and, more recently, chatGPT, two tools from OpenAI (which recently received a $29 billion valuation) are taking over the world. Each new piece about GPT-3 tells a different story of displacement: Gone are the halcyon days of students writing original essays, journalists doing original reporting, or advertisers creating original ad copy. What was once the domain of humans will now be relegated to bots. The next technological revolution is upon us, and it’s coming for creative labor.
Timothy Shoup from the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies seems confident that with chatGPT and GPT-3, the problem is about to get much worse, and that 99.9% of internet content will be AI-generated by 2030. The future, in other words, will be by bots and for bots. Estimates like this scare people because they’re couched in the language of science fiction: a dead internet that’s just AI-generated content and no people. But isn’t that a lot of what the internet is already? It’s not as though we don’t know this, either—we are all aware of not only bots but of the sea of bot-generated content that exists on every social media platform and in every Google search.
More here.