Artificial Intelligence will bore us to death before it kills us

Source Domain: spectator.com

Now that MI5 has been called in to protect us from rogue AI systems and Anthropic has opted not to release its Claude Mythos model to the public over safety concerns, it seems that talk of AI erasing humanity is not entirely overblown. But before the world ends, Artificial Intelligence poses another grave threat to humanity: it risks boring us to death.

Lawyers are the first victims of the wave of AI slop that risks drowning us all

Lawyers are among the first victims of the wave of AI slop that risks drowning us all. The Financial Times reports that clients are bombarding their lawyers with letters and emails generated by AI chatbots. One partner at a US firm told the paper he had received so many AI-generated emails that he could not keep up with the ‘barrage’.

As ever, it’s hard to have too much sympathy for overpaid lawyers, not least because some firms have already laid off trainees and paralegals over the supposed efficiency benefits AI was going to deliver for them.

But I know how these lawyers feel. My day job analysing geopolitics has also been made harder, rather than easier, by AI. Normally, I spend hours a day wading through papers on subjects like migration routes or the international traffic in illegal goods. It can be pretty fun if you like reading and hearing about exotic places. Or at least it was until the dawn of ChatGPT.

Now many of these papers have tripled in length and increasingly consist of pages of rather dense text which obscure rather than illuminate the subject. It’s no longer the fabled em dash which is the giveaway of an AI model; if you come across a piece of writing that is overly long, and which contains fatuous and quite bossy bullet points to compensate for the confusion, the chances are that it was probably the machine what wrote it.

As well as wasting the readers’ time, those who use AI to write are cheating themselves: cutting and pasting a computer-generated answer surely misses the…

Source