For all its high and mighty talk about working to build a computer superintelligence that ends up benefitting humanity, OpenAI frequently makes unforced errors and talks about AI the way you would if you’d prefer to make enemies rather than friends.
During a conversation about AI with Dartmouth University Trustee Jeffrey Blackburn and hosted at the university’s engineering department, for example, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati dropped this pearl of wisdom about the impact of AI on creative professions:
“Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place — if the content that comes out of it is not high quality. I really believe that using it as a tool for education, (and) creativity, will expand our intelligence.”
If you believe, as I do, that generative AI in its present form is by and large a scam — built around a sleight of hand that passes off plagiarism and intellectual property theft as a computer somehow learning to be human — statements like Murati’s are particularly infuriating. And you don’t have to be a creative professional, either, to be rankled by her condescending judgment as to who deserves to have a job and who doesn’t in the age of AI.
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Mind you, this was an OpenAI executive who, a couple of months ago, visibly squirmed when asked whether OpenAI’s Sora video tool was trained on YouTube videos.
It’s hard not to feel like OpenAI is just openly declaring war on creative work at this point. I certainly don’t remember anyone imbuing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his minions with the wisdom and the power to decide who deserves a job or not, but maybe that happened around the time he was talking about AI replacing “median humans,” as if there even is such a thing.
It feels so strange to have to verbalize this, but people like me outside of the AI technocult believe that humanity is special and precious — and that all of us deserve a chance at maximizing our potential. That’s the exact opposite of what OpenAI delivers; this is a company, remember, that literally robbed an actress of her voice. “Failing to interrogate these people will cause immeasurable harm to the creatives they’re stealing from, and anyone in the media that believes that Altman and his ilk won’t come for their work is living in a fantasy land,” writer Ed Zitron opined in one of his recent newsletters, titled “Sam Altman is Full of S**T.”
“These companies will make their products worse by forcing AI into them to please investors that only care about growth, and in doing so will drain capital from the tech ecosystem while making the world tangibly worse so that extremely rich people can get a few decimal points richer.”