The AI Media Arms Race

Generative AI here, there and everywhere: Context Collapse #209

Greetings from Ungerleider Haus, where I’ve been drinking way too much coffee this week. This is another way of saying my blood is mostly caffeine at this point. This is absolutely fine.

And…. damn it… I have to write about AI again. Writing about marketing/journalism and generative AI is TAKING UP TOO MUCH DAMN TIME IN MY LIFE. But it pays the bills and I sure like paying the bills.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Over in Big Technology, Alex Kantrowitz wrote something smart about the AI PR industrial complex:

Corporations, politicians, threadbois, and ‘thought leaders’ are probing and prodding, searching desperately for ways to use AI to mask problems, gain favor with the public, and monetize attention. Amid real technological progress, they’re forging a broad, cynical, and craven AI PR industrial complex that’s just now coming into focus.

This AI PR industrial complex is growing larger and worse than its predecessors — like crypto — because the technology is making anything seem possible. With so much opportunity, vacuousness fills the gaps, and exploitation follows. Random academics are hitting the speaking circuit to declare ChatGPT could turn us into paper clips. Middling politicians are writing implausible bills hoping to land on the Sunday talk shows. And CEOs are using AI as an excuse for absolutely anything that goes wrong in their business.

You should really read all of Kantrowitz’s post if AI—and, especially, how people perceive, understand, love and fear AI tools—is something you think about a lot.

And here’s the thing…. With generative artificial intelligence tools (and, fuck it, let’s just say AI for that. You know what I mean), all of the following can be true:

1. AI will have a transformative effect on society.

2. AI will create a lot of new jobs and make a lot of job duties obsolete.

3. AI, at least at any point in the near future, won’t cause any sort of apocalypse scenario.

4. A lot of technology companies, marketers, entrepreneurs and hucksters of all stripes have a vested interest in TALKING. ABOUT. AI. AS. MUCH. AS. POSSIBLE.

More after the jump.

---

---

Google & AI

I’ve also been thinking about AI, content and the web a lot. And how it’ll play out. So have the folks at Alphabet and Google (maybe you’ve heard of them?) The company’s annual Google I/O conference was a few days ago and AI was top of mind.

AI tools are a bit of an existential threat to Google, which makes a ludicrous amount of money from selling ad space in their search results. Because it turns out that asking questions to generative AI and getting results is less of an advertising-friendly space than conventional search engines at the moment, Google is at risk of losing lots and lots of money to rivals like ChatGPT and ChatGPT-powered Bing. Google has their own AI product, Bard, but it’s less robust than its rivals. Google, obviously, wants to change that.

Melissa Heikkila gets it:

Billions of users will soon see Google’s latest AI language mode, PaLM 2, integrated into over 25 products like Maps, Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and the company’s chatbot, Bard. For example, people will be able to simply type a request such as “Write a job description” into a text box that appears in Google Docs, and the AI language model will generate a text template that users can customize.

But…