Save time by reading a summary
Accidentally opened something in Acrobat Reader and was welcomed by this:
Okay. So. This is where we are at. This... reads like an instruction. Not an option or an offer. After all, why wouldn't you want to save time? Be efficient? Optimise? Long document? Why would you want to read all that? Why not let AI decide what is important for you?
How could this possibly go wrong?
I didn't want to write about AI. I wanted to ignore it because it's too gold rush tulip mania Emperor's New Clothes to expend my energy on. But it is unrelenting. Every day The Discourse steals more from us, the models steal more from us. Stuff like the above happens. It's in every tool I use now. I'm not being allowed to ignore it and go about my life in peace. My email offers to summarise a three sentence message for me. Websites offer to make AI images for me. Notion keeps waving AI in my face on every single screen.
I've no doubt some uses of AI are great! It's a great pattern matching tool. Use it to assess scans for tumours. Fantastic. Humans are very fallible monkeys. We need help in some things. I've used AI in Google Lens when I take a photo of a plant to work out what it is.
Then on the other hand there's an advert I've had the misfortune of watching where Matthew McConaughey extols the virtue of AI-assisted customer service whatever. Sitting outside a restaurant in the rain. No human would seat someone outside in the rain. We do not need AI to help us with this.
I'm not afraid of AI because I think it's going to Skynet us to extinction. I'm hostile towards the people pushing AI who want to move fast to make money and break things like our humanity. Society as collateral damage to their ambition. It's yet another enclosure, us being robbed by mega-corporations that just extract and extract and extract apparently unconcerned that at some point there will be nothing left.
If people want AI to summarise everything so they don't have to read it... fine. That's been a thing since before AI. There's a value in reading the real thing, is all I would say. If people want to use AI to make art and stories... I mean, I guess. I can't stop you. I'd point out that a moving story or interesting article is more than pattern matching everything that went before. Also, your creativity is important. To you, and to everyone else.
There's no 'gotcha' here in that I've probably unknowingly read AI work or seen AI pictures. I might even have liked them. That isn't a thing to shame me with, it's just a symptom of how wild this whole thing has gotten. I don't want to participate in a lot of this stuff. It's starting to feel like I'm being forced to. Make it optional. Make it something I can turn off. Just let me read long documents in peace. Let me make my notes in peace. Just let me be.