Will Generative AI do more harm than good?

In early March 2023, I had a debate with Keith Teare, hosted by the organization Open to Debate, on the question of whether ChatGPT would do more harm than good. I think about that question a lot, nearly every day.

Right now, the negative argument against generative AI—the ledger of bad things—is quite serious. We have nonconsensual deep fake porn, a rise in phishing scams, wholesale disinformation, cognitive surrender, threats to democracy from the subtle influence of governments on LLMs, not to mention the use of generative AI as a surveillance tool. And the effects of all that IP theft on artists and writers, and potential negative effects more broadly across the employment market (though, mercifully, these have been more modest than some people expected).

And then there is the deluge of hacks that some have called “Black October”.

Paul Kedrosky just dubbed it The Hackening.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, called it a “Code red”, amplifying a dark tweet from Anthropic’s Jason Clinton. I think both are right. (Though, to be sure, Clinton thinks this awful period might last only a year or two.)

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But what about the positive side? Are all these risks worth taking? Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, at times fairly positive about the technology, just made a brutal case that many of the positive effects we were led to expect simply aren’t materializing:

You can read the full thing here.

It ain’t over yet. And I certainly have friends who have gotten a lot out of generative AI (mainly for coding), but at this point it’s not hard to make the argument that it has on the whole been a net detriment to society.

And there is still the chance it will pull down the entire economy.

Buckle up! Turbulence ahead.

Bonus: I will return to Open to Debate on Tuesday in Baltimore, partnered with Cathy O’Neil. No public livestream, but there will eventually be edited versions both on YouTube and many NPR affiliates, including WNYC.