Since ChatGPT captured the public consciousness in early 2023, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted three things. Vast amounts of media attention, controversy and, of course, capital.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Funding for generative AI companies<\/a> quintupled year-over-year in 2023. The number of deals increased by 66%, that year. And, as of February 2024, 36 generative AI startups had achieved unicorn status with $1 billion-plus valuations. In March of 2023, chatbot builder Character.ai raised $150 million in a single funding round. They did this without a single dollar of reported revenue. They weren’t the only ones. A year later, the company is currently at the centre of a bidding war<\/a> between Meta and Elon Musk\u2019s xAI. Unsurprisingly, they also aren’t the only ones. Tech giants with near-infinitely deep pockets are fighting to capture top AI talent and technology.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The frenzied investment and industry-wide rush to invest is understandable. Since the launch of Chat GPT (and the flurry of image generators, chat bots, and other generative AI tools that quickly followed) industry experts have been hammering home the same point again and again. They say that generative AI will change everything.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Experts from McKinsey said in June 2023 that \u201cGenerative AI is poised to unleash the next wave of productivity<\/a>.\u201d They predicted the technology could add between $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy every year. A Google blog post<\/a> called generative AI \u201cone of the rare technologies powerful enough to accelerate overall economic growth\u201d. It went on to effusively compare its inevitable economic impact to that of the steam engine or electricity.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to just about every company pouring billions of dollars into AI projects, this technology is the future. AI adoption sounds like an irresistible rising tide. It sounds as though it’s already transforming the business landscape and dividing companies into leaders and laggards.\u00a0If you believe the hype. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Increasingly, however, a disconnect is emerging between tech industry enthusiasm for generative AI and the technology\u2019s real world usefulness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In October, people using Microsoft\u2019s generative AI imager creator found that they could easily generate forbidden imagery. Hackers forced the model, powered by OpenAI\u2019s DALL-E, to create a vast array of compromising images. These included from Mario and Goofy participating in the January 6th insurrection. They also management to generate Spongebob flying a plane into the World Trade Center in 9\/11. Vice<\/em>\u2019s tech brand Motherboard<\/em><\/a> was able to \u201cgenerate images including Mickey Mouse holding an AR-15, Disney characters as Abu Ghraib guards, and Lego characters plotting a murder while holding weapons without issue.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft is far from the only company whose eye-wateringly expensive image generator has experienced serious issues. A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins in November found that \u201cwhile [AI image generators are] supposed to make only G-rated pictures, they can be hacked<\/a> to create content that\u2019s not suitable for work,\u201d including violent and pornographic imagery. \u201cWith the right code, the researchers said anyone, from casual users to people with malicious intent, could bypass the systems\u2019 safety filters and use them to create inappropriate and potentially harmful content,\u201d said researcher Roberto Molar Candanosa.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond image generation, virtually all generative AI applications, from Google\u2019s malfunctioning replacement for search<\/a> to dozens of examples of chatbots going rogue, have problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As the technology struggles to bridge the gap between the billions upon billions of dollars spent to bring it to market and the reality that generative AI may not be the no-brainer-game-changer on which companies are already spending billions of dollars. In truth, it may be a very expensive, complicated, ethically flawed, and environmentally disastrous solution in desperate search of a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMuch of the history of workplace technologies is thus: high-tech programs designed to squeeze workers, handed down by management to graft onto a problem created by an earlier one,\u201d Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine<\/em><\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have not lost a single wink of sleep over the notion that ChatGPT will become SkyNet, but I do worry that it, along with Copilot, Gemini, Cohere, and Anthropic, is being used by millions of managers around the world to cut the same sort of corners that the call centre companies have been cutting for decades. That the result will be lost and degraded jobs, worse customer service, hollowed out institutions, and all kinds of poor simulacra for what used to stand in its stead\u2014all so a handful of Silicon Valley giants and its client companies might one day profit from the saved labour costs.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAI chatbots and image generators are making headlines and fortunes, but a year and a half into their revolution, it remains tough to say exactly why we should all start using them,\u201d observed Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of technology at Axios, in April. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, the Generative AI genie is out of the bottle. The budgets have been spent. The partnerships have been announced. Now, both the companies building generative AI and the companies paying for it are desperately seeing a way to justify the expense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s likely that AI will have applications that are worth the price of admission. One day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Its problems will be resolved in time. They have to be; the world\u2019s biggest tech companies have spent too much money<\/a> for it not to work. Nevertheless, using \u201cAI\u201d as a magic password to unlock unlimited portions of the budget feels like asking for trouble.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Mehul Nagrani, managing director for North America at InMoment, notes in a recent op-ed, \u201cthe technology of the moment is AI and anything remotely associated with it. Large language models (LLMs): They are AI. Machine learning (ML): That\u2019s AI. That project you\u2019re told there\u2019s no funding for every year \u2014 call it AI and try again.\u201d Nagrani warns that \u201cBillions of dollars will be wasted on AI over the next decade,\u201d and applying AI to any process without more than the general notion that it will magically create efficiencies and unlock new capabilities carries significant risk. <\/p>\n\n\n\nBuilding the generative AI future is harder than it sounds <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Is generative AI a solution in search of a problem? <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
AI in search of an easy win <\/h3>\n\n\n\n