Artificial Intelligence: 2025's Offering For Chicken Littles Worldwide

 "Y2K is gonna demolish the world's banking system."

                                                                            – Some Tech Guru to his Followers, Probably

"Ebooks will completely shred the publishing industry."

                                                                 – An agent I met at a publishing conference in 2005

"AI is going to be the end of writing. All writing."

                                                                – Far too many click-bait articles currently littering the Internet

It's 2025, and once again, the sky is falling.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

See above.

Look, I get it. Doom-scrolling has practically become an olympic-level sport over the last decade. And yes, both of the examples I noted above were change events in their own distinct ways.

But Y2K didn't destroy the banking system (although it did manage to scare the pants off of multitudes of people who ought to have known better, plus, without Y2K would we have ever had the glorious piece of film-making which was Mike Judge's Office Space?). And neither has it done in online commerce, for that matter.

"Peter....whaaaat's happening...."

And ebooks haven't decimated the publishing industry. If anything, more people are making more money from writing, both fiction and non-fiction, than ever before. Not since the paperback revolution of the late 1950s and '60s, has the occupation of "author" been so democratized. And mentioning 2005 is important for context, too. Because 2005 was the year I got my first book deal. And in the six years that followed I wrote nine more books in rapid succession.

(And it was a good thing I had the fairly lucrative opportunity to publish so many books so quickly. Because I really needed the money!)

All of this is not to say that there hasn't been rapid, technology-induced paradigm change, especially in publishing. And yes, there certainly has been some consolidation among the "Big Five" traditional publishing groups.

And so what? Movies come in color, too, these days.

I am no more prepared to shed tears over the demise of the insular, competition-averse, NYC-centric "traditional publishing" system than any of those publishers would be ready to cry over the long breaks I have taken between writing projects.

And here, in a nutshell, is why I find the current brouhaha over AI "writing" so much hyperventilating.

Because, in a word, it sucks.

AI in its current iteration isn't, in the strictest sense, even the most basic form of "intelligence." AI possesses no agency, forms no opinions and sets no goals and doesn't know the sting of failure. It's really just a bunch of LLM ("Large Language Model") programs that have been fed massive amounts of data, much of it protrpetary, all of it purloined. And when asked a question, it collates the data it possesses, and spits out an answer.

And just around half the time that answer at least partially inaccurate.

Doesn't that sound actionable? Shouldn't the creators of the mass of content these AI companies stole without their consent in order to kick-start their "revolution" be compensated for their work being used for purposes for which it was never intended?

Absolutely. And the lawsuits are just now beginning to get filed.

I'm currently on vacation (the Coast, natch.) with my family, so this will be a two-parter, and I'm gonna close for now. When I post again in a couple of weeks, I'm bringing examples and receipts.

In the meantime, how about you? Please feel free to share your own AI experiences, good, bad, or mediocre in the comments, and I will incorporate responses to them in next time's exposition of the myriad shortcomings of "Artificial Intelligence."

See you in two weeks!