No going back
There are technological achievements that humanity cannot undo and that have consequences that we have to learn to live with - for better and worse.
The atomic age is one such example - nuclear weapons have plaid a major role our politics, war planning, and diplomacy since the end of WWII. As much as we may want to live in a world without the possibility of annihilation there is no way to give back the fire to the gods.
More practically, atomic testing has significant deleterious side effects in the form of radiation. Detonating an atomic weapon sends radiation into all parts of the world causing side effects that have unexpected consequences; such as irradiating corn husks which Kodak used in packaging for X-Ray film, leading Kodak to learn about the Trinity test before it was public knowledge.
Another is irradiating steel.
Steel requires significant amount of air in its production process, which if this air is irradiated because of air burst tests will result in a slightly irradiated steel. Not enough to be harmful to humans, but enough to mess up any physics or medial equipment dealing with detecting radiation. Critically, these components are used in the very systems that are needed for atomic research.
Atomic testing wreaked a key component required for the testing, manufacturing, and maintenance of these weapons.
The work around for this was to find “Low-background Steel” - steel from sunken ships that would not have been irradiated by atomic testing and would not mess up the sensitive testing equipment.
Thankfully, with the ban on atomic weapons testing background radiation in the atmosphere has dropped enough that we’re no longer needing to mine Atlantis.
History rhymes
Generative AI has been producing wild content that is so human-like its hard to spot the difference. So hard that the systems that we built to collect and collate data are not able to recognize it for the fake content that it is.
Google, in its quest to make all information accessible and searchable, is starting to push up generated content in its search results that are wrong, but not in a way that a machine can tell the difference.
Take this midjourney image of “tank man selfie”:
The problem with it is that it’s pretty good - good enough that so long as you don’t look too close at the cars, positioning of the lampposts, or question why someone is taking a selfie in front of a tank then you may not register whats happening. Its also good enough to trick google:
Or, take this example of “can you melt an egg?”. If you search for this in quora, you’d find a ChatGPT generated answer that was wrong:
But, because of Quora generally being a source of good information, Google picked up this wrong answer and promoted it as an answer in its search:
These answers are good enough that Google can’t tell the correct answer from a generated hallucination.
Generative AI wreaked a key component in the way that we process and understand data, and it will keep doing so until we stop using it.
Chained to a rock
The genie is out of the bottle, there’s no going back, we’re closing the barn door after the horses are out, etc etc etc. Lets dispatch with the tired idioms.
Whats next? What does it mean to live in a world where the systems that have been set up to collect and make useful the entirety of human knowledge are now corrupted with generated crap, with value ranging from useful summarization to automated gaslighting at scale.
One prediction - data providence becomes a staple of the world to come. Both for the AI models that we’re using (can we trust the data this is built on is correct?) and for human generated content (a newspaper vouches and ensures that its journalists are fact-checking their stories).
A second - generative AI companies will pay through the nose for datasets that are free of generative content, to avoid feedback loops and ensure a source of truth for training. The data equivalent of “Low-Background Steel”.
A third - the value of in-person human interactions will increase as content mills flood digital spaces with low-quality generated material, creating a same-y, beige colored experience thats all re-heated content of what we’ve seen before.
And there’s no going back.