2:05pm
Saint Paul
In a Newsweek article from 1995, computer engineer Clifford Stoll predicted the Internet would be dead within a year.
Boy was he wrong!
Stoll couldn’t foresee the tech advancements that have since transformed… well, everything.
But Stoll did get this part right:
“Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.”
If Stoll thought the Internet was filled with unfiltered fluff back then… well, it’s only going to get worse with AI.
Because ChatGPT and other AI tools can’t create original ideas. They generate text based on predictions from other data they have analyzed.
And as it begins to feed on its own data… it’ll dumb down the already dumb content out there.
I warned about this a few weeks ago on Twitter.
And now there’s a research group warning of this same problem.
They call it Model Collapse—read about it here.
Now that doesn’t mean that AI WILL collapse.
But that your ability to create new ideas and connections will always be in demand.
Your ability to find and pull the levers of human desire and emotion will be in demand.
That your ability to connect with fellow humans will be in demand.
Which, for a writer like you and me, is a good thing.