They put rotors on them and guns and explosives. Right now there’s still a human attached to other end of the signal or cable, but that won’t cut it for much longer.
I’d say killing creativity will be just a temporary concern.
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Yes, this is what you’d expect from the maths for LLMs, which is what we’re talking about here, of course. LLMs being a subtype of neural nets, which themselves are a subtype of AI.
Neural nets are functions of universal approximation. Very broadly, that means that to get arbitrarily close to the function being modelled, the number of neurons in the net tends to infinity.
Thus, when pundits declare LLMs will improve until they take over the world, there’s a whole bunch of us just rolling our eyes and pointing at the maths and laughing.
As I like to say: marketing is a psychopathy.
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This.
Unfortunately, for the legions of companies trying to profit from AI, Rosie is still impossibly difficult. But Rosie would be the best don’t you think?
Instead, they leverage vast quantities of computing power to generate the most likely word after the previous one and trumpet the result which in the latest survey of AI-generated search results is 60% accurate. Gosh! 60% that’s amazing!
Aside from Facebook’s insistence that I am passionately interested in steam locomotives and their diesel successors ( 
) I’ve noticed an astonishing increase in AI-written posts. Why do I know they’re AI posts? Because they are insufferably bland . . . as, er, language generated by statistics will be.
Dave
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Meanwhile, in a bookshop near you…
This photo is, of course, “fake”. No AI was used in its production. It was done the “old fashioned” way by having an idea, travelling to a location, taking a whole bunch of photos, and then recompositing them in Photoshop (without GenAI tools).
Not considered: actually moving the books and signage in the shop to just get the photo in one shot, using a film camera, or making an oil painting of the scene.
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Yeah – I agree.
It’s the audience demand feedback that generates that homogenisation. It’s the same as how AI pictures tend to have a specific “look”. The reason they have that look is because people are actually trying to get that “made by AI” vibe for aesthetic reasons. AI image generators are capable of producing pictures without that over-smoothed, just subtly cartoonised version of photo realism, but for the most part they don’t because that’s not what audiences are demanding right now.
At my work we just finished a recruitment round to try and hire someone. We received over 170 applicants for a single role. The applications were practically identical, because they’d all been written by (or at least augmented by) AI tools. We ended up interviewing 12 people, none of whom had the skills or experience suggested in their applications. The role remains vacant.
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“An elegant emptiness.”
Writers respond to the AI-written “creative writing” piece posted above by Keith.
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When did KB lose his hair? Did I miss the announcement/party?
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A bug in my follicular system resulted in me deleting the whole thing in my early forties. 
I have no idea why Image Playground buried me up to my shoulders, though–I guess we should worry about AI’s plans for us.
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I would never call myself creative. That rather puts me off. Maybe because I’ve rarely heard or read anything that I would even call an idea from those who do. Maybe I know the wrong people. For my part, I’m content with occasionally having good ideas… 
This is a phenomenal image. Did you do the photographing and composite?
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AI applications are not meant for writing fiction or history books. They are tools for engineers and others writing reports and summaries. Microsoft’s Copilot is a good example of this. The language used in these tools is just to convey information. Without AI, an engineer’s writing might be even harder to understand.
The remedy for that is not AI but better training for engineers. Donald Knuth (Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computing at Stanford) used to lead a course on Mathematical Writing. (The course materials were later pulished in a book of the same name.) Communication is an essential skill and one that should not be devolved on software drawing on dubious sources. And we all know what a fiasco Microsoft’s Tay chatbot became with a day of its release with its spouting Nazi-related responses!
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Whatever. I’m a non-native English-speaking engineer. In school, I studied several European languages, including Swedish, German, and French. My English coursework was minimal, and I don’t feel fluent in the language. MS Copilot has proven a useful tool for rapidly drafting English reports, in my experience. Even if I don’t use it for stylistic improvements, it’s good at catching grammatical errors. Excuse my language.
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Take your point but communication skills are over and above being Fluent in a working language.
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I did. All part of my ongoing commitment to personal procrastination for the mild amusement of strangers.
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See this is the thing. AI is capable of doing some things much better than I’ll ever be able to do. For example, this is my best effort to produce a portrait of KB:
The AI picture is an undeniably better technical picture. AI could easily replicate mine, and I would never be able to replicate the AI picture.
I have totally been tempted to use AI-created images for book covers. I actually did produce a mock up AI cover for a project which will never get used because I just. can’t. bring. myself. to. When (and if) that project ever sees the light of day it will inevitably have a worse cover because I’m not skilled enough to produce something that meets my vision for it without AI, and I’m not wealthy enough to be able to pay someone talented to do it for me.
There will be people having that same internal conversation with themselves about using AI to produce written work (I couldn’t even bring myself to say “write with AI” there). I get why people would want to use it. I know I probably shouldn’t care what a consenting adult does with an LLM in the privacy of their writing nook, but I just do, dammit, because as the Manic Street Preachers once said: If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next.
#FeltCute #MightDeleteLater
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I should probably point out that I’ve never actually seen KB so you shouldn’t put much store in the accuracy of the portrait.
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Tell that to the companies who are breathlessly promoting them as general purpose writing software.
Also, most engineers would get fired if they could only achieve a 60% accuracy standard. AI Search Has A Citation Problem - Columbia Journalism Review
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Kewms, I apologise, but I respectfully disagree with your assessment of AI’s alleged uselessness. I wouldn’t trust AI to gather information from outside sources, either, but AI’s applications, from engineers’ perspective, show significant potential for efficiently summarising emails/articles and creating reports from verified internal data. It goes without saying that all reports produced by the AI require verification and proofreading from a qualified professional; however, the AI’s help still provides a substantial reduction in overall work hours.