The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism

A few months ago, Casey Newton of Platformer ran a piece called " The phony comforts of AI skepticism ," framing those who would criticize generative AI as "having fun," damning them as "hyper-fixated on the things [AI] can't do." I am not going to focus too hard on this blog, in part because because Edward Ongweso Jr. already did so , and in part because I believe that there are much larger problems at work here. Newton is, along with his Hard Fork co-host Kevin Roose, actively engaged in a cynical marketing campaign, a repetition of the last two hype cycles where Casey Newton blindly hyped the metaverse and Roose pumped the bags of a penguin-themed NFT project . The cycle continues with Roose running an empty-headed screed about what he "believes" about the near-term trajectory of artificial intelligence — that AGI will be here in the next two years, that we are not ready, but also that he cannot define it or say what it does — to Newton claiming that OpenAI’s Deep Research is " th ... Read full article.