Have you seen those ads for businesses which will do your social media for £100 per month? Really? How much do you know about Barclay James Harvest? These ads are fronted by people born in this century who would have to rely on AI to generate content because they’d have zero experience to draw on and they couldn’t tell you their favourite Steve Miller Band album from a banana. They haven’t seen any of the bands I talk about, let alone understand the culture that an album comes from.
But this is how things get distorted because they have no experience and rely on AI they don’t know if anything is true or not. Usually AI can get basic facts right but excludes important information. Of course they wouldn’t know that. And because AI has no brain, it only draws on what has already been written, which if it isn’t correct, means it will just perpetuate the error.
Yet I do use Gemini to research my own experiences to find out such things as the date I saw a particular band. It’s good for that but if I ask it what the best Jethro Tull album is, it will prevaricate and question what you mean by ‘good’ but I know it’s Songs From The Wood and I can tell you why. AI won’t do that unless you tell it to.
I have no objection to being made irrelevant by AI, especially if it gives me more time to listen to Gentle Giant records, but I know it can’t write my thoughts and experiences. It doesn’t have access to my synapses. So if you write only about facts and figures, it will be able to replace you. But if, like me, you talk about memories, perceptions and feelings, it would have to fake those. It’d have no knowledge of me being sent to the Headmaster’s office for freaking out to Speed King at a school disco nor the acclaim I received from my contemporaries for doing so.
I tried to get it to write a chapter of my next novel. But despite comprehensive instruction, what it came out with was garbage. All emotional intelligence was stripped out, to be replaced by cliches and text that sounded written by a 10-year-old.
Certain types of content creators are definitely being replaced by artificial intelligence, but anything subjective, less so. At least for now.
I do think you could build an AI version of yourself by inputting experiences and memories to get approximately correct responses. But would it be the same as what a real brain comes up with?
