AI absolutely has the potential to enable great things that people want

The current implementation of very large data sets obtained through web scrapping, very aggressive marketing of these services such that the results pollute existing online data sets, and the refusal to tag AI generated content as such in order to make filtering it out virtually impossible is not going to enable great things.

This is just spam with the dial turned up to 11.

Capitalism can ruin anything

There’s definitely an argument that privatization and profit motive have driven the enormous amounts of waste and digital filth being churned out at high speeds. But I might go farther and say there are very specific bad actors - people who are going above simply seeking to profiteer and genuinely have mega-maniacal delusions of AGI ruling the world - who are rushing this shit out in as clumsy and haphazard a manner as possible. We’ve also got people using AI as a culpability shield (Israel’s got Lavendar, I’m sure the US and China and a few other big military superpowers have their equivalents).

This isn’t just capitalism seeking ever-higher rents. Its delusional autocrats believing they can leverage sophisticated algorithms to dictate the life and death of billions of their peers.

These are ticking time bombs. They aren’t well regulated or particularly well-understood. They aren’t “intelligent”, either. Just exceptionally complex. That complexity is both what makes them beguiling and dangerous.