“You must be my lucky star!” “Star light, star bright!”

I raised this as a concern at the corporate role I work in when an AI tool that was being distributed and encouraged for usage showed two hallucinated data points that were cited in a large group setting. I happened to know my area well, the data was not just marginally wrong but way off, and I was able to quickly check the figures. I corrected it in the room after verifying on my laptop and the reaction in the room was sort of a harmless whoops. The rest of the presentation continued without a seeming acknowledgement that the rest of the figures should be checked.

When I approached the head of the team that constructed the tool after the meeting and shared the inaccuracies and my concerns, he told me that he’d rather have more data fluency through the ease of the tool and that inaccuracies were acceptable because of the convenience and widespread usage.

I suspect stories like this are happening across my industry. Meanwhile, the company put out a press release about our AI efforts (literally using Gemini’s Gem tool and custom ChatGPTs seeded with Google Drive) as something investors should be very excited about.

Thanks for following up. I am glad your friends still made their own song. I think AI as a conceptual tool is a more constructive application of the technology than AI as a direct generator of art.

Personally, I make things and am an artist as well. I don’t think AI can directly replace what I do or what others in my field do with any satisfaction, but it can devalue the market in which I produce substantially and increase entropy and imitations to the point where signal from noise becomes harder to discern.

🤷 Let’s hear it.

With the amount of energy put into GenAI and the sheer bulk of content generated, why don’t advocates have at least one example of something artistically interesting, unique, or beautiful to showcase their claims? Has it yet made anything of cultural importance that will illicit more than a chuckle and a ‘like’?

It seems to me I keep hearing non-artists assert that this will be a great thing for art, while real artists who disagree are labeled Luddites or not genuinely creative in some way. It’s frustrating to watch them openly say easily disprovable things. This isn’t speculative anymore these systems have been in production for years at this point. Let’s look at the actual results.