Controlling Fire

Andrew Stanton, director of WALL·E and Finding Nemo, on AI, from his conversation on How I Write:

It’s a quite scary and impressive tool. I had a line that didn’t make it into my recent movie, In the Blink of an Eye. Commentators on the news were discussing how every couple generations, humanity reinvents fire. It takes a while for them to figure out how not to burn themselves but instead warm themselves. That’s what I believe we’re seeing with AI. It can do a lot of damage, and hopefully, it will also do a lot of good.

AI is the fire of our era. And the parallels to another fiery invention are hard to miss: Gutenberg’s printing press. Introduced in the 1440s, it eventually led to positive changes like a surge in literacy and the democratization of human knowledge. But it also brought on mass disinformation, censorship, a ton of low-quality content, and religious wars fueled by cheap-to-produce pamphlets.

It’s hard to believe these downsides were from the 15th century when they map so cleanly onto our current era. Social media, even pre-AI, has made distributing mass disinformation routine. Now that AI is wired into content factories, the noise jumps to another level.

The pace of AI advancement plus the greased distribution of modern social media makes Gutenberg look like a dress rehearsal.

It took two centuries for the press to get its counterbalances like copyright laws and editorial standards. How fast can we get from burning ourselves to warming ourselves with this new fire?