Technology

Because the people with power funding this shit have pretty much zero overlap with the people making this tech. The investors saw a talking robot that aced school exams, could make images and videos and just assumed it meant we have artificial humans in the near future and like always, ruined another field by flooding it with money and corruption. These people only know the word "opportunity", but don't have the resources or willpower to research that "opportunity".

Why has the world gotten both "more intelligent" and yet fundamentally more stupid at the same time? Serious question.

Because it's not actually always true that garbage in = garbage out. DeepMind's Alpha Zero trained itself from a very bad chess player to significantly better than any human has ever been, by simply playing chess games against itself and updating its parameters for evaluating which chess positions were better than which. All the system needed was a rule set for chess, a way to define winners and losers and draws, and then a training procedure that optimized for winning rather than drawing, and drawing rather than losing if a win was no longer available.

Face swaps and deep fakes in general relied on adversarial training as well, where they learned how to trick themselves, then how to detect those tricks, then improve on both ends.

Some tech guys thought they could bring that adversarial dynamic for improving models to generative AI, where they could train on inputs and improve over those inputs. But the problem is that there isn't a good definition of "good" or "bad" inputs, and so the feedback loop in this case poisons itself when it starts optimizing on criteria different from what humans would consider good or bad.

So it's less like other AI type technologies that came before, and more like how Netflix poisoned its own recommendation engine by producing its own content informed by that recommendation engine. When you can passively observe trends and connections you might be able to model those trends. But once you start actually feeding back into the data by producing shows and movies that you predict will do well, the feedback loop gets unpredictable and doesn't actually work that well when you're over-fitting the training data with new stuff your model thinks might be "good."

Remember Trump every time he's weighed in on something, like suggesting injecting people with bleach, or putting powerful UV lights inside people, or fighting Covid with a "solid flu vaccine" or preventing wildfires by sweeping the forests, or suggesting using nuclear weapons to disrupt hurricane formation, or asking about sharks and electric boat batteries? Remember these? These are the types of people who are in charge of businesses, they only care about money, they are not particularly smart, they have massive gaps in knowledge and experience but believe that they are profoundly brilliant and insightful because they've gotten lucky and either are good at a few things or just had an insane amount of help from generational wealth. They have never had anyone, or very few people genuinely able to tell them no and if people don't take what they say seriously they get fired and replaced with people who will.

Because the dumdums have access to the whole world at the tip of the fingertip without having to put any efforts in.

In a time without that, they would be ridiculed for their stupid ideas and told to pipe down.

Now they can find like minded people and amplify their stupidity, and be loud about it.

So every dumdum becomes an AI prompt engineer (whatever the fuck that means) and know how to game the LLM, but do not understand how it works. So they are basically just snake oil salesmen that want to get on the gravy train.