Oddbean

2) they look at the output in a field or area where they have zero experience and say "wow! that's impressive!" when they have no way of knowing whether it's impressive because they don't work in that field. i can put Python prompts into ChatGPT and get what look to me like incredible results, but it's silly to people who do code for a living. or i just heard a snippet of a podcast that Spotify auto-translated into Spanish. the journalists were like "sounds great!" folks, it was nonsense.

i think both of these approaches obscure the massive changes underway in our digital lives. by failing to emphasize the work-a-day ways in which AI is developing to become very competent, journalists are leaving the public unprepared. and by failing to get feedback from experts in the fields where these companies are claiming non-existent competence, journalists are encouraging people to trust AI to do tasks that it is fundamentally not ready for.

in the end, i suspect this is the result of Silicon Valley companies very effectively curating the legacy media tech journalists that inform the general public. they reward the superficial gee-whiz tech journalism about Apple adding a new button or whatever by providing further access. but these tech journalists are **not** the ones equipped to help us grapple with how this new technology is upending basically every part of the economy and the workplace.

@dee34601 and when more qualified journalists like the NYT start digging into issues, the tech companies and their boot lickers start whining about an anti-tech agenda because, like conservatism, tech is always good and cannot possibly be wrong

@dee34601 Good TED talk! What are some areas you think it has the potential to become very competent in? I am a LLM skeptic, but realize w/ the amount of money being poured into the field there will probably a lasting impact of some sort. "Customer Service" comes to mind, as does marketing copy generation. Any other areas on your radar?