“Digitale Wissensbissen": Will AI die of inbreeding?

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.

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