#10 Deathbed Visions and other cheerful things
In my valiant attempt to keep up with what is happening in the broad field of tech giants, AI and LLMs, I read two very interesting posts recently.
Thad McIlroy, who writes a valuable blog called The Future of Publishing, published a post called Could the AI Industry Implode? While discussing the fact that the most positive outcomes for AI-driven innovation are coming through medicine and healthcare, he outlines a series of problem that are being widely reported currently - that the training models' appetite for data is too huge resulting in 'data-guzzling', AI content creation platforms were made available too early without any attention to regulation or governance, and that many platforms have asked us to share our content with them without giving our consent for this particular type of exploitation.
McIlroy goes on to discuss the enormous PR issue the entire sector has created for itself, including the on-going cacophony over tech's cavalier attitude toward copyright:
Regardless of the legal issues here, these companies are behaving like 300-pound bullies cross-pollinated with 3-month-old babies. They are cheerfully irresponsible — though prone to tears — at the same time that they try to intimidate their critics into silence.
The piece continues with a look at what is happening within the publishing industry and concludes by saying:
It’s a simple statement that publishers have nowhere to hide from AI. It is now, and will increasingly be, a part of how writers write and how editors edit and how marketers market. It is now inextricably entwined with the future of publishing.
And this is something we are all going to have to reckon with. Unless, of course, it all implodes.
McIlroy mentions Gary Marcus in his post; Marcus is a long-term critic of the AI sector and his most recent post, Generative AI as Shakespearian Tragedy, should really be called I Told You So.
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It's not the death of AI that the subject of this newsletter refers to, but a fascinating article in the NYTimes Magazine published last month, What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living. That link will take you to a page on the website of the Buffalo Hospice and Palliative Care Centre instead of the paywalled NYTimes article; Buffalo is where Chris Kerr is based, the chief scientist behind this research that studies the visions of loved ones that people have while they are dying and how these visions differ from hallucinations and delusions. You can listen to the article on the NYTimes Daily podcast as well.
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I can no longer look at the word 'hospice' without thinking of the tv series Girls5Eva and the girl band member who decides her stage name should be 'Ho Spice' before realising she has to spend too much time telling people not to write it down.
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