All these thoughts I keep having about AI, I’m going to put them here…
It’s already too late to take these tools away from their most passionate users – and it’ll soon be too late to take them away from workers. 13 March
It’s said that blocking AI will be counterproductive because if we do then only bad actors will progress and we’ll wind up only with bad AI, but this essentially deletes human agency all together. It must be possible for humans and human institutions to just say ‘no’. 13 March
A tricky aspect of arriving at an accommodation with AI is that quite a lot of its output will actually be a kind of hybrid – part human and part AI. Unpick that, AI police. 11 March
Good art is true. All of it. AI art can never be true. It can be plausible (useful, persuasive, stimulating…) but it can never be true. In this AI art is like bad art. They’re the same thing. They’re not true. This seems obvious to me. 11 March
Don’t refuse to use AI because of an ethical objection to one of its applications or to a particular, exploitive use or because you have a vague idea that it’s ‘evil’ or ‘stupid’. 8 March
It’s safe to assume that AI will improve. That gaps will disappear, errors and hallucinations diminish, plausiblity and usefulness increase. Don’t expect it to fail or weaken or ‘eat itself’. 8 March
With AI, discrimination will become a more valuable skill. Not magically being able to ‘detect’ AI work – for that will surely soon be impossible – but being confident in your judgement of all work, whether human or AI. 7 March
Copyright does a very simple thing: it provides a creator a temporary monopoly. Should we suspend this 300 year-old protection so that AI businesses can train their models cheaply? Should a nation voluntarily suspend copyright to boost the AI economy? No. 5 March
In criticising AI poetics will be more useful that hermeneutics. In fact, the profusion of increasingly-plausible AI work surely represents some kind of crisis for interpretation. Susan Sontag saw this coming. 2 March
Is AI going to be one of those tech innovations that actually reduces profit? Like the web and solar power – producing huge incomes for critical businesses but driving down profitability across whole industries? Seems plausible. 27 February 2025