AI in the Popular Press
The Shoggoth is an AI meme to describe the sense that AI is somehow mysterious and alien.
Shoggoths are fictional creatures, introduced by the science fiction author H.P. Lovecraft in his 1936 novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” In Lovecraft’s telling, Shoggoths were massive, bloblike monsters made out of iridescent black goo, covered in tentacles and eyes.
Donald Trump finds AI alarming and scary (Twitter interview) -sees how it could lead to accidental nuclear annihilation -“if it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen” and we can’t stop it -we must beat China -knows training runs are electricity bottlenecked and will fix that as president -received $12 million from unspecified “San Francisco super-geniuses” -used ChatGPT to edit a speech and joked about firing his speech writers -referred to superintelligence as “super duper AI” ☠️ -realizes this is gonna be insanely powerful and acknowledged “risk of taking over the human race”
Forbes Billionaires Battle For AI’s Future
New Yorker (Mar 11, 2024) Among the AI Doomsayers is a lengthy profile of some of the people at the center of the AI Doom cult. Based in Berkeley and San Francisco, they share living quarters and obey all the standard “2020s tech” subculture fashions. The article notes the irony that the Doomers, all of whom are well-off financially thanks to technology, are also closely associated with the very companies that supposedly are going to bring our demise.
2024-03-29 Everypixel has a guide to the changing frequency of key AI terms used on much of the web
With the use of NOW Corpus, we accessed a repository containing over 18.8 billion words sourced from online newspapers and magazines spanning from 2010 to the present day. Employing a collocation search, we pinpointed the most frequently used terms related to AI. We also analyzed popular AI blogs and newsletters to identify prevalent terms within AI-centric communities. Additionally, we examined articles on Dictionary.com about new words to trace the emergence and adoption of AI-related terms. All identified terms were cross-checked in the NOW Corpus year-by-year over a 10-year period to track their usage and identify their emergence.
As you’d expect, the frequency usage of all of the terms (e.g. “prompt”, “AI models”, “GPT”, “LLM”) are sharply up and to the right. It’ll be interesting to watch this over the next few years to see the change.
Reason
For Reason’s special AI issue, Virginia Postrel wrote here about why AI is a particularly valuable tool for historians—and why historians are particularly suited to using it effectively. It was inspired in part by reading Benjamin Breen’s fascinating Substack. Also see Res Obscura and The Historian’s Friend or 1690s Physician.