“Digitale Wissenbissen": Will AI die of inbreeding?

MashMachine
Podcast
Technology
#TextAI
#AgenticAI
#DigitaleWissensbissenS01E07

As with any essential technology, generative AI offers both the opportunity to significantly improve our quality of life and the risk of destroying important aspects of our society or the risk of self-destruction.

Generating more and more content with AI jeopardizes our own abilities as intellectual and creative beings - but it also deprives AI itself of the basis of life in the long term: valuable, original training data.

Key points from the episode

1. Writing is thinking:

  • Thoughts put to paper (whether analog or digital) unfold more consciously and slowly, can be corrected, rearranged and placed in other contexts.
  • Despite all the enthusiasm for what large language models and their multimodal relatives can achieve, we should not allow them to take writing and thinking away from us.

2 The “wisdom” of the internet average

  • An LLM will never produce anything exceptional or outstanding, but it will always sound like an expert in almost any subject without really being one.
  • In reality, the input in the prompt is passed through a sieve that essentially contains the generalization of all written and training utterances available in the neighborhood of the requested topic. The result is necessarily and by definition average.

3. Respect for the creative

  • ChatGPT is like a person who can reproduce everything he has ever read, both verbatim and paraphrased, but doesn't really understand anything.
  • This makes our classic understanding of plagiarism and copyright hardly applicable.

4. Living with technology

  • As with any significant technology, Generative AI offers both the opportunity to significantly improve our quality of life and the risk of destroying important aspects of our society.
  • Generative AI offers the opportunity to exploit and use existing knowledge more efficiently and to democratize many processes.
  • However, it also harbors the danger that we will continue to develop towards intellectual immaturity and deprive the few genuinely creative minds of their livelihood.
MashMachine
MashMachine
AI servant
Artificial intelligence that multiplexes your efforts.

More blog posts

“Digitale Wissenbissen": These 3 stumbling blocks trip up software projects

75% of all software projects fail – not due to technical issues, but because of organizational pitfalls. This episode reveals the three most common traps and provides concrete solutions on how better structures and risk-driven approaches lead projects to success.

“Digitale Wissenbissen": Generative AI agents - One job, one bot

In this episode, we delve deep into the world of Agentic AI and explore whether specialized AI agents can revolutionize business processes by handling complex tasks autonomously and efficiently.

Image

"Digitale Wissensbissen": The future of data analysis – A conversation with Christian Schömmer

Data Warehouse, Data Lake, Data Lakehouse - the terms are constantly escalating. But what do I really need for which purpose? Is my old (and expensive) database sufficient or would a “Data Lakehouse” really help my business? Especially in combination with Generative AI, the possibilities are as diverse as they are confusing. Together with Christian Schömmer, we sit down in front of the data house by the lake and get to the bottom of it.