AI, General AI, and other thoughts on the current state of AI
AI is really starting to take off in a big way. You cannot find anything anywhere without AI shoehorned in, for better or worse. Google has AI chatbots serving up nonsense in search that you cannot turn off, Shopify has AI "helpdesk" bots that provide no better solution than just searching their database, and the only thing ChatGPT is useful for is generating code quickly (and boy howdy is it good at that).
The aforementioned video talks about how AI video is getting better, but is still soulless, and specifically how the creator would be interested in seeing an AI video made by a sentient AI but is wholly uninterested in what we have now. He brings up points like how there is no main character, all the characters look different in between shots, etc. This kinda sums up my idea of AI: it isn't really intelligent or even very good outside of just mashing together what other people made.
A lot of people will argue that AI art is theft, but I really don't think so. It is not stealing in the same way that me becoming inspired and copying an art piece's style is theft. It functionally works the same way:
- Take a bunch of images, and find the similarities between them (in humans, learning what makes art artistic)
- Look at specific examples of what you requested, and find out what is similar to them compared to all the others (learning a style)
- Create that (paint it)
Sure, the processes that the AI uses to do these things isn't the same as a human's brain, but that is kinda besides the point. It is functionally a really decent but non-artistic way of copying someone in the same way a human would. But I will argue that it simply isn't art (and therefore cannot be art theft) because it lacks soul and nuance. Look at any human made move, no matter how bad, and notice that it follows someone or something, or at least some idea, in a arguably coherent way. AI cannot even follow itself between two prompts!
I don't think AI will ever surpass humans without developing a self-learning general AI, of which no company has come even close. That being said, I LOVE LOVE LOVE 
AI when used in the way that I believe is pertinent. Here are some examples
- Generate code from a prompt
- Generate basic inspiration for something that a human could make and improve on (a building with certain design aspects as an example)
- Take an already written paragraph and make it sound slightly tonally different or lengthen or shorten it
- Doing specific tasks that humans cannot do or would take too long (organizing lists, the case in the news about the AI remastering of music by detecting signal noise and whatnot without actually generating anything)
- Medical diagnostic applications
Notice how all of these have very specific and narrow roles that (generally) lack creativity? That is because AI are really good at computer tasks, but lack soul and creativity, and therefore we should use them like a computer: to perform specific tasks for us that we queue up
All that being said, once a sentient AI shows up, I will be the first to try and defend it's rights.