Navigating the Noise: A Concise Guide to Filtering Idiotic AI Reporting

1.) Block pipe dreamers. Articles that start with “By 2050…” and proceed to tell us how whatever the boffins have come up with will change society indicate either a company trying to hype its product, a clueless writer filling space with idle speculation, or an AI doing the same.

2.) Shut up scaremongerers. A cry of “Oh no, we can no longer believe what anyone is telling us!” betrays a level of naivete that should disqualify the writer from any public utterance. Images were manipulated long before Photoshop, and fake news have survived from ancient Greece. Expect all talk about regulation (disinformation, Russians, child abuse etc.) to be clandestine manipulation of the vilest kind.

3.) Ban morons. LLMs are incapable of such human traits as “lying”, “hallucinating” and “showing bias”; they are also not designed to be fact-finding tools. When you hear that X relied on a chatbot for a vital task and it all went horribly awry, the only appropriate discussion is how X could have been so stupid. Well, that and why the media keeps soiling minds with such tales.

4.) Mock philosophers. Nebulous concepts like “self” or “ethics” are harmful enough in everyday conversation; applied to machines, the likely result is mayhem along the lines of “Why don’t we give AI an inner monologue and make it feel pain? That will make it more intelligent and ethical!” (Because everything’s better when it’s human.) Mankind’s unending fascination with itself had led to the most grotesque anthropomorphising idolatry yet. Beware of worshipers.

I have just spared you the sight of 90% of news about AI. Will things look better once AI starts to write them itself?