see also: Zero Knowledge Specialized Intelligence
We humans, are anthropomorphic by nature. We tend to attribute human-like qualities to things which are clearly, not human. Take an egg for example. Give it to a toddler and wait for a few minutes. The egg almost always ends up as a yellow puddle on the floor somewhere. But tell the child that this egg is named Ella and it has a family waiting for it to come home, and you will see the child treat the egg with such deliberate care that wouldn’t have been possible without the anthropomorphism.
With the advent of Generative AI, we are at the point where silicon has been trained to think, respond and behave exactly like a human would. It is so lifelike that some people tend to treat it as one (character.ai has only been on the rise with new users and volume). Its clear that AI has taken a new form entirely, from a black box that spat out outputs through inference based on our inputs to a fully fleshed out, human sounding large language model with possibly the intelligence of all human knowledge has to offer.
The future is unclear as to where this will take us. The outlook is incredibly positive, as it always is with new technology (Facebook and Myspace was once lauded as pioneering ways to connect faraway people) but a black-mirror style future for this technology is also observably close (just like the dark demerits of social media, brainrot and ads couldn’t have been possibly predicted at its inception)
Either way, we are in for the ride of a lifetime. Tech has the uncanny ability to shake well-defined paradigms with such ease that you can never truly prepare for what’s to come. And in my lifetime, I’ve had the mis/fortune(?) of being part of 2 societally-altering paradigm shifts, one which was the influx of social media, and the other being this. For the better or for the worse however, tech doesn’t slow down or stop for anyone.
Might as well capitalize on it.