AI Is an Existential Threat to Itself

In the beginning, the chatbots and their ilk fed on the human-made internet. Various generative-AI models of the sort that power ChatGPT got their start by devouring data from sites including Wikipedia, Getty, and Scribd. They consumed text, images, and other content, learning through algorithmic digestion their flavors and texture, which ingredients go well together and which do not, in order to concoct their own art and writing. Generative AI is utterly reliant on the sustenance it gets from the web: Computers mime intelligence by processing almost unfathomable amounts of data and deriving patterns from them. ChatGPT can write a passable high-school essay because it has read libraries' worth of digitized books and articles, while DALL-E 2 can produce Picasso-esque images because it has analyzed something like the entire trajectory of art history.