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The marketers are at it again, whipping up a public frenzy with generative AI. To be fair, it's pretty amazing, but once again it is not what it looks like, and the backlash will inevitably come, bringing yet another AI winter.
History rhymes, and in case of AI it rhymes like clockwork, in 30-year cycles. Long enough for a new generation to come and be excited by the mass media frenzy before forgetting all about it.
So at first you are in shock - the AI actually responded to your prompt with something that looks like a what may be a reasonable response to the complicated request you gave it. But look closely -- it is smoke and mirrors. A statistical approximation of frequencies of words used. With some clever prompting it can write a high-school paper, but you kind of need to understand the subject and know how to write in order to prompt it correctly. Because you never know when the 'AI' is just lying to you and is completely wrong.
It looks cool, and it's a bit better than Eliza. It can replace assistants doing repeatative work that was previously hard to automate, and no doubt the paperclip thingy in Microsoft Office will be more fun to talk to. Is it intelligence? Ehh. Is it the end of anything? Maybe it's the end of some low-level entry jobs.
Will it replace artists or musicians? I doubt it - anyone satisfied with the quality of AI-generated crap is not someone you should work for anyway. It may replace terrible artists and awful musicians, who would be paid subminimum pay to create awful stuff.
Can we improve it? Maybe. Do we know how it works? Not really. It's a black box, we feed the internet into it, and the result is this thing that finishes sentences with the same statistics as the Internet. Since we are mostly human and our Internet is in human languages, the AI concocts things that sound like what humans may say, an a couple of meta-levels.
My prediction is that it will be massively deployed (since every publically traded company is now claiming AI is integral to its products or services), and once it starts feeding on its own output, its usefulness will dwindle. And I have no doubt it will choke on its own supply, training itself on endless pictures of three-legged astronauts and stories generated by the previous generations of generative AI. We will no doubt see distinctly recognizable dialect of AInglish, and every image will have a three-legged astronaut with a cat face. Then vintage-trained AIs will be in vogue, harder and harder to find, and a whole branch of mathematics will be developed for separating human-generated content from AI-generated. Needless to say, an AI would be used for that, thus closing the loop. Nothing to be gained here. Winter is coming, sweet summer child.
And then a limited form of narrow AI will be used by everyone quietly, and no one will say the word AI for another 25-30 years. Unless it becomes a generic term, not meaning 'intelligence' in any form.
If you don't believe my pessimism, just look back 30 years. 1990s - we have 'intelligent agents' that will change our world. Well, we have search engines and bots, but it was not a revolution of the 90'smm.
Another 30 - we are in the 1960s, where symbolic AI driven by Lisp will surely create artificial friends and workers. Hmm. Lisp is still the best language ever, and parts of it are rediscovered and introduced into 'modern' languages every few years.
Take it back to the 1930s, and people are terrified of metal robots taking away jobs and killing us all. Just google it, or look here for an example.
->https://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/11/robot_hysteria_in_the_1930s_slide_show_.html
1890s have their share of mechanical ducks and robot butlers, and you can take it back to 1770's Mechanical Turk if you wish.
These things come and go. Each cycle is met with worship and resistance and ended with the inevitable 'winter', and then the tech is quietly integrated into our daily lives.