AI Execs Are Demanding Government Support—No Questions Asked
Senators didn’t ask those kinds of questions. And the executives they’d invited to Capitol Hill didn’t volunteer answers, preferring the sorts of quasi-religious generalizations that have become a hallmark for the industry. Altman conceded in his prepared testimony that AGI is “weakly defined,” but suggested that it was enough to describe it as “a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields.” It will be, he argued, “the most powerful tool ever created,” enabling people to “build incredible things for each other and improve their quality of life.” It can usher in a future that “can be almost unimaginably bright, but only if we take concrete steps to ensure that an American-led version of AI, built on democratic values like freedom and transparency, prevails over an authoritarian one.” Smith vowed that AI “has the potential to become the most useful tool for people ever invented.”
Altman’s prepared testimony listed out a few similarly broad-strokes examples of how it’s currently being used. US National Laboratories are employing OpenAI products to “accelerate breakthroughs in areas like energy,” while ChatGPT is helping state employees in Pennsylvania “do administrative tasks more quickly.” In his opening remarks, however, Altman mostly focused on how much he liked having a computer when he was a kid.
The ways people use these products in real life, meanwhile, are plain. Social media platforms are clogged with AI-generated slop and photos made to resemble Studio Ghibli productions. Email platforms push users to generate AI summaries of one-line emails. As the Harvard Business Review notes, the top usage of AI technology is for therapy and companionship. People rely on large language models for life advice, and for help crafting texts to their friends and crushes. A recent New York Magazine feature catalogues the widespread use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT by college students, who call on it to write essays and even respond to professors’ prompts asking them to introduce themselves. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” said a Cal State Chico ethics professor who has spent the “the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers.” The tool makes practically every academic task easier with no obvious downside. It is, as the article points out, impossible for growing numbers of students to resist.