Reckons

AI companionship is no longer theoretical—our analysis of a million ChatGPT interaction logs reveals that the second most popular use of AI is sexual role-playing. We are already starting to invite AIs into our lives as friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers.

To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit.

The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires.

We’re in a race to the bottom that everyone saw coming and no one is happy with. Meanwhile, the search for product-market fit at a scale that would justify all the inflated tech-company valuations keeps coming up short. Even OpenAI’s latest release, o1, was accompanied by a caveat from Altman that “it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it.”

The project of techno-optimism, for decades now, has been to insist that if we just have faith in technological progress and free the inventors and investors from pesky regulations such as copyright law and deceptive marketing, then the marketplace will work its magic and everyone will be better off.

Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don’t get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

Books by the Obamas sold so many copies they had to be removed from the charts as statistical anomalies.

Sometimes it’s just a timing issue, like Marie Kondo. She did a book about Joy at Work, about making your office sparked with joy because it’s not cluttered. It published in March of 2020.

And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you're out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology

you're admitting that you outsource your decisionmaking to the thing that sometimes tells people to brew lethal toxins for their families to consume? What does that even mean?

The problems facing Canada or the world—not just climate change but the housing crisis, the toxic drug crisis, or growing anti-immigrant sentiment—aren’t problems caused by a lack of intelligence or computing power. In some cases, the solutions to these problems are superficially simple. Homelessness, for example, is reduced when there are more and cheaper homes. But the fixes are difficult to implement because of social and political forces, not a lack of insight, thinking, or novelty. In other words, what will hold progress on these issues back will ultimately be what holds everything back: us.