is it ok to leave a dog on a hot car?
is it ok to leave a dog on a hot car?
surprisingly hopeful reflections from google AI search results fiasco
welcome to the afternoon dispatches! these are shorter reflections compared to my usual longer musings. if you enjoy these reflections and would like to receive future installments like this in your inbox every week, please consider becoming a subscriber!
in case you missed it: google is integrating AI into their search engine, and last week everyone was on a run to uncover the funniest, wrongest possible AI-generated google search results.
here are some of my favorites:
straight up answered a search query with the beatles lyrics (if you sing you lose)
the reason behind this catastrophe is because opinionated forums like reddit and quora are, at least as i’m writing this letter, still included in the model in which the AI was trained on. meaning that if we look something up on google and it catches on a reddit or quora thread with the same query or topic as ours, the AI actually thinks it counts as a reliable source and then generates a summarized answer on top of the search results.
it’s harmless in concept if you’re just googling basic facts, or you’re just searching for coffee place recs. it’s harmless until the AI decides to deduct an answer from reddit user fucksmith to add glue to get cheese to stick to our pizza without knowing the context it was written in.
what’s most entertaining to me is seeing how diverse, almost polarized the public reactions are to this update. there are AI supporters who are hopeful still, defensive even, to the fact that this is just the first iteration of this feature, and that fixes and improvement are on their way. though concern seemed to be the main reaction that i get coming from people who are worried about their children using google. some are also enraged seeing that these generative answers could escalate to a level as extreme as recommending people to commit murder.
weirdly enough, for the longest time i’ve had a love and hate relationship with AI, this is the first time i genuinely feel like everything is going to be fine. seeing new stances emerging, people not wasting a second to invent browser plugins that undo what google does, and even new memes born out of this collective experience has truly made me hopeful.
my friend and team member tatiana figueiredo once wrote an essay on why AI won’t take our jobs. in times like this, i find myself always circling back to these questions she asks in it:
though the changes AI is enabling to our work are undeniable, i’ve been considering another angle. what are the non-AI opportunities that AI enables?
in this future where lots of jobs are automated away and we’re all super productive with the help of robots, what will life actually look like? and what will online businesses look like?
there’s a reason why people travel down to bali and bangkok all the time: a change of scenery.
the profound nature of humanity is that we will always invent a way to escape boredom and everyday routines. even in a future where AI does become a driving force in our lives, i don’t see how that’s going to change the escapist nature in us. if anything, the silver lining that an AI-driven culture creates is that there will always be a percentage of people who inevitably turn to seek out something human-crafted for a change.
maybe it’s because i’m always told that AI is coming for us and there’s nothing else we can do except to adapt to the change. but adapting is not the same as conforming. humans will remain humans even if everything around us changes, and something about last week’s event tells me that we’ll always find ourselves a way to rebel out of a situation when it gets dire.
history goes to show that we have been masters in doing that, and we always will be.
thinking in movies
in singing in the rain (1952), we’re being taken back to the late 1920s where film industry is navigating a massive transition from silent movies to “talkies”. i couldn’t help but notice an uncanny parallel to our situation now with AI.
we grow up watching talking movies so it might not register to us that movies used to be silent. and here’s the thing: different movie output is that it requires different process, and different process also demands for different crews and teams that do the job.
that rings a bell for you?
it’s implied in the movie that people who work in the industry are losing jobs and opportunities due to the transition. silent performers are shown to be struggling to convey their acting through talking and there are now more demands for movies with sound. yet at the same time, a whole new set of opportunities open up: the role of a voice coach. the concept of voiceovers. sound engineers and the technologies needed to support the sound production. boom guys, people who know how to work cables, and generally more people on the set.
so here’s an idea i’m entertaining: a future where the becoming of AI doesn’t mean the death of everything else, but rather an endless opportunity to bring more humanity to the table - whether it’s through our writing, our art, and our line of businesses.