Emergence

AI isn’t new.

Data protection, and intellectual property arguments are not new.

People looking for easier ways to achieve the same results, looking to avoid hard work, is not new.

Yet there is an emerging trend of reacting to the advent of easy to use conversational tools as if all of these things are new. Or rather, I should say, the trending topic is to be both delighted at what can be done, and righteously indignant at the theft of property which made it possible. The theft of unsecured property in the name of progress has had a few names over history. Socialism (the bad kind). Colonialism (there isn’t really a good kind). Slavery. Privateering.

Politics Aside

Apparently I made this political. I didn’t intend to, but the nature of many of these posts is me figuring out where I stand on a topic. So, let’s talk about the emerging of a new technology and what makes it take off. It isn’t the scale or the expense. It isn’t even necessarily good marketing (although that does help).

Computers have a beautiful and storied history. If we could have gone from Babbage’s machines to where we are today without massive wars, that would have been preferable, but this is the a-political section of the blog. Right? Except that progress is rarely a-political.

Computers started as behemoths. Room sized wonders of vacuum tubes and complexity. Once semi-conductors got involved, and things became smaller, there started to be more of them. Then manufacturing became cheaper, and user interfaces started to matter. When did the PC become normal? After it became accessible to more people. Usable for purposes other than niche engineering and mathematical solutions. Word processing, games, and the joys of the internet.

Other technology is similar. Mobile phones started as niche, expensive, blocky devices. Now you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if you didn’t have the thing. We’re still reeling from that particular emergence of behaviour in society. How much screen time is too much for children? Should they be given smart phones? Am I just a dinosaur missing the “simpler” days of my own childhood? It is no longer entirely odd that I don’t own a television, just as once owning a television was a new thing. The forms of media have changed, and the way we consume them has too.

So, what does this have to do with AI? Well, AI isn’t new. Machine Learning. Neural Networks. Expert Systems. These are all things which have been used to great effect in industry for decades at this point. What is new is that you don’t have to be an expert to interact with a Large Language Model. The conversational interface feels natural, and the things the tool can do goes beyond the niche of a specific industry. Much like cellphones are useful no matter where you work (or live, or play), the chat interfaces are useful for a broad variety of tasks. From planning your day and setting reminders, to generating images in a particular style. The usefulness and ease of access is why we see it (rightfully) getting so much air time.

Lazy People

People are lazy. Citation? I am a person. We want things to be easy. We look for the lowest effort approach to many of the challenges we face in life. Sure, many of us enjoy a challenge of a certain calibre, but we prefer to choose those. We don’t write letters anymore. It is so much easier to shoot off a quick text message to a friend, or rely on their social media presence to keep us up to date. Many of us still take notes and write in journals long-hand, but there are also a significant number of people for whom computers and the ease of typed notes means they seldom have to write anything out longhand. Fonts are a digital art, not something you see played with as doodles in the margins.

So, if we took up typing rather than learning to write neatly and on an even line, why wouldn’t we go further and get the computer system to help with the editing and the content? I will admit to using a spellchecker (you’re welcome). I may be opinionated enough to set it to UK English, but I don’t mind too much if I fail to spell a word correctly the first time (you try spelling ‘necessarily’ from memory). Moving from the spell checker to the system which can give me an opinion on the style of my writing is natural. Need to write a difficult piece of feedback for someone, where you know the details you want to call out, but you don’t want to sound too angry or unprofessional? Getting the language model to help with that can be amazing. Not only did it formulate and structure the message, it comes with the knowledge that this is the accepted way of doing it, because the tool didn’t learn from just one corner of the internet.

So, are we surprised that rather than doing all their own research students are turning to summaries generated by LLMs? How many people got through high school literature by reading the online summaries rather than reading the actual book? Or by watching a movie adaptation of it? How is it any different now when these students hand in work generated by a the machines? I do acknowledge that if they haven’t read the essay they are turning in, then maybe it was a pointless exercise. They are going to do that though. If I could have had a system clean up my writing (particularly second language) I would have got far better marks in school.

Addressing the Elephant

OK. The main point has been made. AI is not new, what is new is how usable and accessible it is. We shouldn’t be surprised at its adoption. I started out by getting a bit political though. I think this is actually the most contentious point about AI and how it has entered the world. I’m not overly concerned about industries being disrupted – we will simply turn to artisan literature the way we have turned to artisan coffee. No, the point I am making is that we have learned nothing from our history of exploitation for the sake of progress.

From the vikings and the mongols to the colonial explorers, people have been pushing the boundaries and taking what they see, without thought, for centuries. As someone who thinks information should be accessible, who believes in equal opportunities, and who wishes that more options were available to people this is a tough one for me. I also don’t want the large corporations to be making money off hard earned skills. I don’t want to see further drivel added to the pot of thoughtless media we interact with on a daily basis. I don’t think it is fair that creative work, and intellectual property laws should be ignored for the sake of building better machines.

“Because we can” or “for the sake of progress” are empty words in my mind. If training these models is already going to chew up natural resources beyond even bitcoin mining, then surely the people whose skills are being mimicked should be compensated for adding their corpus of work to the greater training engine? We would not accept a land-grab for natural resources in this day and age. This is no different in my mind. So, yes. Progress is undeniable, and things will move in this direction. I just wish the large corporates were not given free reign to run rough-shod over the independent creators.

Nothing is New

It doesn’t take a lot of looking to find quotes about how nothing is truly new. In this case, I don’t mean it as a discouragement. It simply is. I would be so happy to know that humanity could generalise the lessons of history into the way we interact in the future, but my experience tells me we aren’t all that good at it. We are still lazy, selfish, and single minded. Greed will be part of the world as long a people are. So, when you look at the emergence of new technologies or new processes don’t feel threatened. You don’t have to jump on the band wagon on day one. There is a reason we wait for the stable release and then use the tool with caution.

Trends will change, the world will move forward. Our role in these emerging ways of life is to try and maintain some sense of shared humanity, not allowing the big negative to outweigh the net positives. Fight against theft and inequality, but accept that progress will happen and what is done cannot be reversed. Be better, but do not self sabotage.

Good luck.