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This may be a cheap laugh, but it points to a problem that (imo) is deeper than the headline-grabbing pseudo-debates about “AI.” The category alone, “AI,” implies that it’s discrete, something new. But what if we don’t assume that? What if we assume instead that it’s a minor, incremental change — less like the invention of personal computing, say, than like some goofy experimental design coming out of Apple? Questions like that are often channeled into technocratic debates about the history and philosophies behind AI and AGI; they’re important, sure, but even that shift in focus tacitly reinforces the idea that debate is the province of experts, IOW that those most likely to be affected by these technologies — workers — have no part in any of this beyond serving as cannon fodder. I think (FWIW) that whole worldview is wrong-headed.
Most pop criticisms of “AI” boil down to something like this: (1) it feeds on the endless landscapes of the products of human effort; but (2) since it doesn’t really understand those things or their context, (3) what it produces is “delirious,” stuff that mimics human effort, modulating it in ways that can range from astonishing to hilarious to horrifying; but (4) the utterly opaque ways it does this, far from being “free,” let alone progressive, distill cultural biases; and (5) that regressive effect is reinforced by where and how it’s being rolled out by industry — say, some woolly mix of better, faster, more convenient, more competitive, etc.
Except we’ve all been doing this by hand, artisanally, for a century or two — call it the “primitive accumulation” phase. And I don’t mean that as some useless vague abstraction, I mean it concretely and specifically: if you look at the development of language, imagery, genres, tropes over the 20th C+ — through successive waves of newspapers, radio, cinema, magazines, television, billboards, music, etc — you’ll see the general critique above isn’t a critique of “AI” in particular, it’s a critique of pop culture in general. “AI” is better understood as “APC”: Automated Pop Culture.
If you want to view this all through a hierarchical lens — for example, by joking that Yuval Noah Hariri has been writing stupider and stupider books, lowering the bar for “intelligence” — go ahead. But take his name out of it and what you end up with is bog-standard griping about cultural decline.