Oh No! AI is Stealing What Capitalism Has Already Ruined
And Maybe For the Better
If you told me the latest season of The Mandalorian was written by ChatGPT, I would believe you. I’m sure it almost certainly wasn’t, but, the TL;DR of this article is that large language models, as well as similar programs that generate images, are basically doing what corporations do. They take an aggregate of lots of input and past patterns and output something that matches expectations of what it is people might want to see.
Whether the results are “good” or not is a subjective discussion that’s kind of beside the point. Though I suppose from the title you’d be right to suspect that I’m pretty cynical about the state of popular culture. Isn’t it sad, when you think about it, about how so many of our cultural touchstones are owned by corporations who have no interest in the stories we tell ourselves except to make profit? But that’s a big topic for another day.
What I’m focused on here is that with the advent of a few technologies that are dubiously labelled “artificial intelligence,” people are anticipating a world in which AI is able to generate not only stories, but the means to convey them to us in compelling mediums.
It’s one thing to have a language model string text together in a script format such that humans have to do…
