generated children’s stories with custom characters, settings, lessons, and music. As the App Store listing assures parents, “You don’t need to write a single word.”
At last, a tech company has found a way to outsource humanity’s oldest pastime: using our imaginations.
Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do, and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a new metric: the Genie coefficient.
But look on the bright side: this is real vertical integration, people! Just imagine a future in which the same company can sell you a) a robot to teach you at school; b) a robot to compensate for the fact that you never learned to make friends at school; and c) a robot to gratify you because you’re lonely, alienated and your job just got automated out of existence!
It was coined in January by Tristan Harris at the Center for Humane Technology. He said it’s the “next evolution” of the extractive-tech model where companies use advanced technologies to commodify the human capacity to form attached bonds with other people and with pets.
A hotel being sued for mass food poisonings was described as “spotless” and a resort where guests complained of sexual harassment by staff was praised for “friendly” service by an AI intended to summarise millions of Tripadvisor reviews.
The tech industry is about to flood the market with AI glasses with cameras for multimodal AI. But the public is already turning against the idea. Who will win?