... h-AI-llucinations ...

AI has been on my mind a lot lately. It’s in my work and inundating pretty much every other part of life these days. I know how these cycles go - we are working ourselves toward a new normal where AI will do, and be used to do, some things - and a whole lot of other things it won’t because it isn’t (and won’t be) very good at those things. We’re still figuring out what that balance will be - but probably not listening to those folks predicting the unencumbered growth of AI over the next few years is a good idea. We have already started hitting some of those limitations and we will continue to do so. Quite aside from the considerable ethical considerations with use of AI (trained on unpaid work of lots of different human creators, energy considerations, potential for misuse, etc.) AI just isn’t very good at most things. It does a reasonable job of a lot of things (which is, not to sell it short, incredible) but it’s really doing stuff that’s middle-of-the-road, not great. Sure, we might mistake AI for incredible insight or brilliant creation or astounding insight at times just in the way we (humans) commonly mistake the mundane for the incredible when it’s put forward by other people. I don’t think AI can really get beyond this - it’s not how AI works. Is it an amazing advance? Sure. Does it have - and will it continue to have - limitations? Yep.

Anyway, enjoy this comic where I imagine AI having fun hallucinating.