The Who Moved My Cheese? AI Awards!

2. British author Philip Womack

Ege: AGI will take another 20-30 years, with a prediction of around 2045 for a ‘drop in remote worker replacement’.

Philip: ‘AI will never write good fiction’: ‘Who will be able to distinguish the merely competent human screed from the merely competent AI? …if millions start pretending they’re the cat’s pyjamas at writing, let me tell you now: things are not going to end well. I imagine Altman believes that if he prods his code for long enough, it, and by association he, will win the Booker. But it won’t, and can’t.’

Simon De Jocas (founder of Publishers Without Borders): ‘AI-published books will simply be a marked copy of what human authors published many years ago.’

Prashant Pathak (co-founder of Publishers Without Borders): ‘AI still has limitations and works on the basis of what was already created. Human intelligence has no bounds. However, we need to master AI to stay ahead of it.’

Christian Weiss (publisher Draupadi Verlag): ‘[I] cannot imagine AI translating poetry… AI always repeats something that is already here. So, I think AI cannot compete with human beings in being creative and inventing new forms of writing.’

2. Ben Affleck on CNBC

Ben Affleck: ‘AI is a craftsman at best. Craftsmen can learn to make furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating. That’s how large video models, large language models, basically work. A library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret it in context, right? But they’re just cross-pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created… It’s not going to replace human beings making films.’

Bruce Schneier: ‘AIs at this point don’t have the common sense baseline humans have…. AIs can become our minions. They’re okay. They’re not that smart. But they can make humans more efficient by outsourcing some of the donkey work… Even if AI could do a mediocre job at reviewing all of the source code, that would be phenomenal, and there would be a lot of work in all of these areas.’

Article

2. Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett: ‘I think we should be very cautious with [AI], because innovation without imagination is a very, very dangerous thing… our time here is finite, and that is something that AI will never understand. It can imitate it, but it doesn’t understand that deep existential dread, and it doesn’t understand the preciousness of each moment in its cellular makeup, not that it necessarily has cellular makeup yet. That is something that can’t be replicated.’

Article, paper (PDF), bonus Slashdot discussion with archive

The study was published in Aug/2024, but conducted on four very dated model families including GPT-2 from 2019 [hahaha], from the paper: ‘GPT [GPT-2 1.6B, GPT-J 6.7B, GPT-3 175B], T5 [770M], Falcon 1 [40B], and LLaMA 1 [30B].’

2. Ben Borgers, software dev

Ben Borgers: ‘AI is an impediment to learning web development… portions that looked LLM-written — that is to say, overly-commented, dissonant, and, at times, horrifying… Use of LLMs hinders learning of web development.’

(Take-Two includes Rockstar and Zynga. They make Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead, Words with Friends, Farmville…)

2. Dove

3. IOC President Thomas Bach

‘At Dove, we seek a future in which women – not algorithms – get to decide and declare what real beauty looks like… Pledging to never use AI in our communications is just one step… AI creates unrealistic images that breed an environment that makes it hard for girls and teens to be able to discern between what is real and what isn’t.’
[Alan: C’mon guys, can’t you just look ahead a few months?!]

‘Unlike other sectors of society, we in sport are not confronted with the existential question of whether AI will replace human beings. In sport, the performances will always have to be delivered by the athletes. The 100 metres will always have to be run by an athlete – a human being.’

Here’s that again in a timeline with references:

Apr/2021: EU AI Act draft does not mention anything about post-2020 AI like GPT or LLMs in general (OECD).

Sep/2022: I call the EU AI Act ‘a true abomination’ (The Memo).

Jun/2023: EU specifically adds ‘foundation models’ to the EU AI Act (EU PDF).

Dec/2023: EU agrees on AI Act (EU).

Apr/2024: EU might formalise AI Act (EY pdf).

Apr/2025: EU AI Act comes into effect for GPAI including training of new foundation models (Akin).

2. The Grammys

3. Nikon Peru

4. Belgian ad agency, Impact

The Grammy awards are banning AI-generated music, ‘A work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any categories.’

Nikon: “Millions of people around the world are generating surreal images just by entering a few keywords on a website, which is directly affecting photographers”

“AI can do a lot. But AI can’t finish this building on the Keyserlei in Antwerp. AI can’t fix a leak or install a heating system neither. Crafts(wo)men are here to stay, and they deserve to be recognized. Their skills are simply irreplaceable.”
[Alan: Good luck with that. Give it a few months.]

(I’m sure we addressed this back in my 2017 article:

The five-year-olds who started kindergarten this year [in 2017] will be at university in 2030 and will spend most of their working lives in the second half of the 21st century. It’s always been the case that our schools hold the future within their classrooms, but today’s education systems need to set the foundations for these young children to thrive in life and work in 2050 and perhaps through to 2090.

While many schools are happy to wax lyrical about their modern curriculum and environment, it’s clear that the number of… schools actually preparing their students to live in the year 2090 is close to zero.)