Just as much as a full-blown marketing tsunami has built around the adoption of artificial intelligence tools, a loud cottage industry has emerged to promote a vigorous counter-narrative. For some, it’s not enough simply to be skeptical: Only full-blown catastrophism will do.
■ The catastrophist says that because of AI: No one will read anymore! No one will believe anything they see anymore! Everyone will fall for fakes, propaganda, and misinformation! Nobody will know how to write anymore!
■ Because they go too far, their catastrophic claims are readily dismissed. And that’s a very big problem. The all-or-nothing tendency risks crowding out the much more modest but much more likely claims with which we really should grapple, thoughtfully and critically.
■ The catastrophic projections are too much. But their 5% versions are both more realistic and potentially more frightening. What if 5% of kids grow up to be functionally illiterate because of AI over-exposure? What if 5% of voters believe anything in their tainted information diets without applying any critical thought? What if well-meaning people dismiss 5% of the things they used to take seriously because their mental filters are calibrated too high? What if 5% pure nonsense creeps into the mainstream of published literature and commentary (and search results) under the names of legitimate writers who nevertheless use AI carelessly and without disclosure?
■ A degree of harm is still harm, but mitigation of harm is not the same as binary approval or disapproval of a thing. It’s harder to speak in nuance, but generally much more important. The telegraph, the automobile, and the Internet all arrived without causing society to crumble -- but they caused very big changes that should neither have been catastrophized nor overlooked. The extreme versions of events tend to distract us, though, from the 5% outcomes that are vastly more likely to occur.
