Our Society Is Not Prepared For This Much Awesome

Almost all of the fears around AI right now boil down to one thing: fear about what happens when a whole bunch of people, instantly level up and get really good at making cultural objects.

The story so far: We’re not even a year into the generative AI revolution, which I’d date with the launch of StableDiffusion in August 2022, and already so many parts of our culture are rekt.

👀 A very brief, random look at a tiny bit of the damage, as of this morning:

Outlets that publish short fiction are now flooded with AI-generated submissions to the point that they’re doubting whether the idea of such outlets is even viable now. The main complaint doesn’t seem to be that this stuff is terrible (though much of it is, no doubt), just that it’s not made by humans.

ArtStation and related venues are flooded with AI-generated submissions and are trying to enforce some sort of tagging policy so they can separate what’s human-made. Again, it’s not bad — it’s just not human.

College admissions offices bracing for a wave of AI-generated personal essays. Same story… not bad, just not human.

College professors are getting AI-generated work in response to assignments. Yet again, more stuff getting rekt by sudden, non-human awesomeness… Or, well, maybe better-than-averageness, but soon-to-be awesomeness when the next wave of LLMs drops.

K-12 school teachers are getting (presumably awesome) AI-generated work from students so some districts are trying the head-in-the-sand approach. They want to hide from the non-human awesome.

I just pulled the above out of my TL and my inbox from this morning. I’m sure readers could supply many more examples from their own inboxes and feeds.

arketyp.

Almost all of the fears around AI right now boil down to one thing: fear about what happens when a whole bunch of people, instantly level up and get really good at making cultural objects.