AI is Great! Also, AI Sucks

Why we keep hearing -- and will keep hearing -- both claims

Image: DALL-E 3. Prompt: “In the style of a Matthew Brady photograph, a mob with pitchforks and torches attempts to kidnap a robot, while another mob, with bats and hammers, fights to defend the robot. There is only one robot in the image.”

Every day some some media outlet tells me artificial intelligence has amazing, superhuman powers. Every day some media outlet calls AI, as Wired recently described Perplexity.ai, a “bullshit machine.” From journalistic habit I tend to see this contradiction as an argument that one side will win, as one side takes the crown in a courtroom or at the ballot box. But I see now that this isn’t the right way to understand our weird hype/debunking moment.

AI’s advent isn’t a two-sided contest. It’s a broad incoherent movement, in which most people don’t participate. Among those who do take part, some are visionaries pushing their ideas; some are adopters sensing that they can really do great things with these tools; some are Dickensian cheapskates who want…