The Optimized Marketer: Writing with AI: Future-proof Your Talent and Position Your Business for a World Transformed by AI (The Optimized Self)

the anxiety that technology will make people obsolete is familiar and pervasive.

Fear that machines will steal human jobs recurs with every technological leap.

“Hallucination”—Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2023

the anxiety that technology will make people obsolete is familiar and pervasive.

Every now and then, life throws you a curveball. I’ve found that the best way to deal with a curveball is to learn to hit it. Adapt and reinvent yourself.” —Alex Elle

I asked whether it had made that up too. It confessed that it had. This time, however, the case was real. My AI had hallucinated its hallucination of the event.

What generative AI has become so adept at so quickly is language. Language and the stories we use it to make are what inspire human trust and affinity and are the base currency of all human institutions.

AIs putting forth factual inaccuracies has to do with their function of plotting a middle course between multidimensional universes of data points. They’ve consumed reams of quality research on astrophysics—but also a fair bit about the earth being flat and the moon being made of green cheese. Each is assigned a probability.

The problem may even get worse. Generative AI is producing vast amounts of questionable content that contaminates the datasets on which future AIs will be trained.