Alt Text: A comic in four panels:
Panel 1. On a sunny day with a blue sky, the gothic sorceress walks away from the school with the Avian Intelligence Parrot in her hands toward the garbage.
Gothic Sorceress: “Enough is enough, this time it’s straight to the garbage!”
Panel 2. Not far away, a cute young elf sorceress is discussing with her Avian Intelligence in the foreground. Her Avian Intelligence traces a wavy symbol with a pencil on a board, teaching a lesson.
Elf Sorceress: “Avian Intelligence, make me a beginner’s exercise on the ancient magic runic alphabet.”
AI Parrot of Elf Sorceress: “Ok. Let’s start with this one, pronounce it ‘MA’, the water.”
Gothic Sorceress: ?!!
Panel 3. The Gothic Sorceress comes closer and asks the Elf Sorceress.
Gothic Sorceress: “Wait, are you really using your?!”
Elf Sorceress: “Yes, the trick is not to rely on it for direct answers, but to help me create lessons that expand my own intelligence.”
Panel 4. Meanwhile, the AI Parrot of the Elf Sorceress continued to write on the board. It traced a symbol of poop on the board, then an XD emoji. The Gothic Sorceress laugh at it, while the Elf Sorceress is realizing something is wrong with this ancient magic runic alphabet.
AI Parrot of Elf Sorceress: “This one, pronounce it BS, the disbelief. This one LOL, the laughter.”
Gothic Sorceress: “Well, good luck expanding anything with that…”
I’m well-aware of all that, but if you think that’s not going to change, you’re a bigger fool than the AI-evangelists. Even if it doesn’t change, the distinction won’t matter all-too-soon.
By all means, leave the overblown toy to the delusional right-up-until AI, whether truly intelligent or better-at-faking-it than today, has killed us all.
The danger here is not the tech developing into an uncontrollable beast that will kill us all. There is no way that GenAI can advance far enough to develop conciousness; that’s a completely different tech tree. It is not a baby whose development we need to guide, it is a puppet dancing on strings.
The danger is the people in positions of power who are pulling the strings. The idiot C-level admin who thinks GenAI will magically develop consciousness and replaces a bunch of essential staff. The incompetent CEO who can’t write an email to save their life believes GenAI is just as useful for all their workers and forces workers to babysit AI Agents. The unscrupulous politicians who relax regulations to allow AI companies to suck up resources that the rest of us need. These are all people who will benefit from the GenAI boom at the cost of literally everyone else.
The focus should be on these irrational, powerful people who are destroying the planet and ruining lives to make their puppet dance a little more convincingly.