This is another article that, for me, sort of walks right by the answers without realizing it. As I was reading, I was thinking "does this person really not think AI is going to be flooded with ads soon enough?" Then they asked the LLM that, and it basically said yes, and then the response. . . to go "Hmmm, I wonder if that will happen"? Yes, of course it's going to happen. Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content. Why would we believe anything different of AI? The only way it won't happen is if we decide we don't want it, instead of accepting it as inevitable.
And well, the article is ostensibly about AI, but then at the end:
> The investors aren’t just doing this to be nice. Someone is going to expect returns on this huge gamble at some point.
> ...
> The LLM providers aren’t librarians providing a public service. They’re businesses that have to find a way to earn a ridiculous amount of money for a huge number of big investors, and capitalism does not have builtin morals.
Those are the things that need to change. They have nothing to do with AI. AI is a symptom of a broken socioeconomic system that allows a small (not "huge" in the scheme of things) number of people to "gamble" and then attempt to rig the table so their gamble succeeds.
AI is a cute bunny rabbit and our runaway-inequality-based socioeconomic system is the vat of toxic waste that turned that innocent little bunny into a ravening mutant. Yes, it's bad and needs to be killed, but we'll just be overrun by a million more like it if we don't find a way to lock away that toxic waste.
And well, the article is ostensibly about AI, but then at the end:
> The investors aren’t just doing this to be nice. Someone is going to expect returns on this huge gamble at some point. > ... > The LLM providers aren’t librarians providing a public service. They’re businesses that have to find a way to earn a ridiculous amount of money for a huge number of big investors, and capitalism does not have builtin morals.
Those are the things that need to change. They have nothing to do with AI. AI is a symptom of a broken socioeconomic system that allows a small (not "huge" in the scheme of things) number of people to "gamble" and then attempt to rig the table so their gamble succeeds.
AI is a cute bunny rabbit and our runaway-inequality-based socioeconomic system is the vat of toxic waste that turned that innocent little bunny into a ravening mutant. Yes, it's bad and needs to be killed, but we'll just be overrun by a million more like it if we don't find a way to lock away that toxic waste.