Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
AI start-ups and big tech companies are spending tens of billions of dollars trying to win — or at least not die in — what has been widely described as an AI arms race: firm against firm, country against country, model against model, in a battle for total future supremacy.
Outside the AI firms, where millions of people are experimenting with large-language-model-powered chatbots and software tools in their daily lives, and employers are trying to figure out what AI can do for them, smaller versions of the same dynamic are showing up everywhere. From the New York Times:
With a simple prompt, ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, will insert every keyword from a job description into a résumé. Some candidates are going a step further, paying for A.I. agents that can autonomously find jobs and apply on their behalf. Recruiters say it’s getting harder to tell who is genuinely qualified or interested, and many of the résumés look suspiciously similar …
… One popular method for navigating the surge? Automatic chat or video interviews, sometimes conducted by A.I. Chipotle’s chief executive, Scott Boatwright, said at a conference this month that its A.I. chatbot screening and scheduling tool (named Ava Cado) had reduced hiring time by 75 percent.
Stories about AI deployment tend to fall into a few categories. You’ve got productivity stories, where workers — most visibly at tech companies — talk about how AI tools are making parts of their jobs easier or harder, increasing their workload or simply making them redundant and taking their jobs. You’ve got top-down management stories, where AI use is suggested or mandated by leaders demanding more efficiency, who are either betting that a great deal of automation is possible within their firms, or who are just worried about getting left behind.
Then you’ve got the stories in which people are more clearly using new AI tools against one another in an escalatory way. Job hunters, now able to generate custom applications instantly, flood employers, so employers turn to AI to manage the glut. Spammers and other bad-faith actors flood social media with near-infinite material, pushing the platforms to double down on automated moderation. Rapidly generated presentations lead to rapidly scheduled meetings recorded and automatically transcribed by AI assistants for machine summarization and analysis. Dating-app users generate chats with AI only to be filtered and then responded to by someone else using AI. The starkest and most consequential such story is what’s happening in education: Teachers dealing with students who generate entire essays and assignments are turning to AI-powered plagiarism detectors, or getting pitched on ed-tech software that solves cheating with surveillance — with, of course, the help of AI.
These are stories about AI, but they’re also stories about broken systems. Students flocking to ChatGPT in the classroom suggests that they see school in terms of arbitrary tasks and attainment rather than education. The widespread use of AI in job hunting drives home the extent to which platforms like LinkedIn, which promises to connect job seekers with employers, have instead installed themselves between them, pushing both sides to either pay up or dishonestly game their systems. A dating app where users see opportunity in automated flirting must already be a pretty grim space. If Facebook can be so quickly and thoroughly overwhelmed by AI-generated imagery and bots, it probably wasn’t much of a social network anymore — a low-trust platform better at monetizing users than connecting them. Smaller-scale AI arms races like these don’t take hold unless users (or workers, or students) have already been pitted against one another by systems they don’t respect. In an uncomfortably large portion of modern life — especially online — that’s exactly what’s happened.
Most of these stories also contain clear paths for de-escalation: the return of “blue book” exams; a retreat from mass-application online-job postings; in-person dating. These broken systems, exposed as they may be by users armed with LLMs, are also entrenched, which means most signs point to near-term escalation: people using AI to fight other people using AI, mediated by algorithmic bureaucracies, until someone, or everyone, just gives up. It might all work out, in other words. But first, things will probably have to get a lot worse.
