Generative AI is the most transformative application of AI yet, and its potential is both huge and concerning for us (as consumers)
The rise of artificial intelligence has been nothing short of meteoric. In just a few years, AI has transformed from a niche technology to a mainstream tool used across a wide range of industries.
From retail to healthcare, AI provides value to businesses of all sizes. However, one area where AI is just now getting started and will soon be overwhelming: is content generation.
Copywriting is often seen as a low-skill, high-volume task ripe for automation. And several startups are already using AI to generate articles, blog posts, and marketing materials. The worry is that as AI-generated content becomes more sophisticated, it will flood the internet with low-quality, average range, overwhelming the human-made content.
Many of these are being marketed as productivity tools, such as writing 10X faster or clearing writer's block. However, that is just a window dressing for what it is: AI is writing and generating blogs, ads, copy, posts, pictures, (& very soon videos).
In the next five years, we will see a continued increase in the amount of AI-generated content on the internet. This content will be generated by various AI systems, from simple rule-based approaches to more advanced neural networks & beyond. And it will cover a wide range of topics, from the latest news to product reviews to scientific articles.
The main problem with AI-generated content is that it is often of poor quality or imitation quality.
This is because AI systems still need to match the creativity and nuance of human writers. As a result, AI-generated articles tend to be plagued by grammatical errors, choppy sentences, and a lack of imagination. The more you look for it, the easier it is to spot when these articles are being generated not by humans but by machines.
Another issue with AI-generated content is that it can be used to manipulate public opinion. This is because AI systems can be biased in favor of certain viewpoints, depending on how they are trained. For example, if an AI system is trained on a dataset of pro-anarchy articles, it is likely to generate pro-anarchy reports (you can insert pro-anarchy for anything you choose). This could seriously impact how people form opinions on political issues. Expect the 2024 USA election to be dominated by this content as well as politicians acting as if they understand it and the implications for our free world. (Hint: They won’t.)
So far, the impact of AI-generated content has been relatively limited. This is because most of it is still very basic and needs to be improved to pass as human-written content. Many images being created clearly look fake / computer generated but this will change as AI systems become more sophisticated in the next five years. We could see a situation where the majority of content on the internet is generated by AI, with human-written content becoming the minority.
This would have several consequences:
First, it would mean that the quality of content on the internet would decrease dramatically. With so much low-quality, average range, it would be hard for people to find the good stuff.
Second, it would also have a profound impact on the way that we consume information. We would (and do) increasingly rely on algorithms to filter content rather than engage with it ourselves.
Third, it could have a detrimental effect on democracy, as AI-generated content could be used to manipulate public opinion on a large scale (ranging from simple, what product to buy, upwards to complex, such as a nation turning against another nation due to the content generated).
What can be done about this?
If the government or big tech (in their ivory towers by the coast) can’t stop spam emails or spam robocalls, what makes you think we will stop AI content? (Hint: We aren’t going to, it is here to stay.)
The only solution then is to develop novel ways to understand our new way of life and adjust accordingly to living with humans and AI content on the internet.
That’s what we are doing over at 1-Decision.com. We understand where the world is going in the next 10 years, and we are here to help consumers (starting with parents) by cutting through human and AI content alike… using AI (oh, the irony)—” Putting your everyday life decisions on cruise control.”
Feel free to email me: collin@1-Decision.com, connect on LinkedIn, or follow me for more!
