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

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.

It’s not stealing to build the future if you believe it has belonged to you all along.

avid users of these chatbots are self-selected to be enthusiastic and open-minded about the field of AI

Rather than appealing to some vague notion of the awesomeness of progress, or the malignity of technology, we want, collectively, to coordinate on paths of technological development that will have spread benefits as broadly as possible, while mitigating for, or compensating for the costs.

LLMs should not be viewed as a substitute for high quality human generated knowledge. They should instead be viewed as an obligate complement to such knowledge - a means of making it more useful, which doesn’t have much independent worth without it.

If misinformation is a societal disease, it should be possible to cure societies of various problems by eradicating it.

To establish effective AI governance, then, is the challenge for civil society organizations and social innovators.

We wouldn’t, and we won’t, unless he can convince us doing so is the only way to solve every problem that terrifies us. Climate change, the cure for cancer, an end to war or, at least, an end to fear that we’ll be victimized by crime or terrorism, all of these have been touted as benefits of the coming AI age. If only we can reach the AGI promised land.

established artists, who found AI a potent site for imagination decades ago, had the benefit of AI being speculative. At that point, speculation was an imaginative philosophical exercise, rather than a political one.