A.I.: Anti-Intellectualism

The cruelty has been puzzling me. Under almost every post which recounts the anguish of someone seeing AI models becoming shockingly good at their own craft, there is a stream of comments telling the poster to, essentially, accept their own obsolescence. If the poster calls for this development to slow down, the response is to stop standing in the way of progress. If the poster wants to nuance the picture of the machine god steamrolling everything, reply guys call it “cope” and “cringe”. Most recently, this has been happening in mathematics with the field’s shocked reaction to the deluge of AI-generated proofs, but similar dynamics have played out for musicians and visual artists, and to a more limited extent for programmers.These people seem to be cheering for the machines rather than humans. But I don’t think it’s as simple (or as extreme) as anti-human sentiment. The more charitable read is that most of these people really believe that this represents progress. They are excited…