Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544300
40 M PS E . O R G SSS: See, I was avoiding talking about AI because I wanted to talk about you, Mark Mangini, and your experiences and your failures that have brought you to your success. AI is a whole different thing. MM: That's maybe another article. SSS: Yes, because you're at the beginning of the AI phenomena, and whether you want to retire, right? Another thing we want to but haven't talked about is your retirement. MM: Sure. Let me say this about AI, and maybe this will help put a bow around it. For more than 100,000 years, humans, Homo sapiens, have been tool wielding creatures, and over the last 100,000 years, we've managed to live lives, increasingly more productive and more healthy lives using ever more sophisticated tools. So, we might ask; Should we stop? Should the cave person not have picked up the first bone and hit the saber-toothed Tiger over the head with it to protect the family? Should we have not embraced movable type? Should we have not embraced the computer? We are animals that live and flourish using tools. We must fundamentally look at AI that way and then figure out what its unique relationship to us is. I think there is a benefit in every tool. We just have to decide how we want to frame the tool and how we can use it for its best purposes. We're not going to stop using tools. Right? Who would profess that creativity was ever tool- free? That's a dangerous myth. SSS: It's going to happen. You see AI as a tool? MM: Absolutely unequivocally, it can't be anything else but. SSS: It's just a tool for us humans to use. But the tool cannot come up with a human idea. MM: AI creates things that are a semblance of an idea, as such they aren't much more than enhanced imitations. Remember, current artificial intelligence works by leveraging pre-existing data using LLMs (Large Language Models). When you query AI, all it can look at is something that's already happened, already ideated, already dreamed up by a creative person … and rearrange it in a new way. That's not innovative, right? In fact, AI succeeds as nothing more than a recursive feedback loop, which means, as AI spits out "new" information based on variations of existing knowledge, that becomes part of the corpus that gets fed back into the LLM. In this scenario, AI starts to feed itself its own output, which dilutes its database, making the imitations it creates, increasingly "imitative." Rinse and repeat. This is happening already. Originality isn't and never will be clever rearrangement, it's the artists' vision that makes the familiar suddenly new. AI certainly has the ability to