Most techies now dabbling in the media are arrogant amateurs who think that because they excel in one area, they are masters of all domains. What they really are is incompetent at giving any insight or illumination beyond their own narrow self-interests while decidedly cheapening discourse. Elon Musk is the patron saint of this practice, holding forth on everything from COVID to what Russia is doing to a recent series of disturbing declarations about immigrants, which are beginning to eerily echo the rants made by his grandfather in South Africa. Even mulling the implications of the head size of newborns delivered via cesarean has not escaped his twitchy fingers. Having had one of those for my eldest and pretty sure it had no impact on any of my four kids’ intelligence, my advice to Elon and his nearly all-male cronies: Take a seat, boys.
Unfortunately, rather than ceasing, they are now poised to take it all with an assist from the newest game in tech: artificial general intelligence, or AGI. In the short term, it’s already clear it could be devastating for media companies — Google will not just be providing algorithmic search results; it and others like OpenAI have been using the new tools to scrape content largely made by others and reformulate it for the masses. That’s a simple way to describe it, but what could happen is what happened before: a complete hijacking of the content universe. What do you need New York Magazine for if they can swallow it, digest it, and regurgitate it back up in ways both anodyne and dangerous like the careless Information Age turkey vultures they have always been?