| Human output may merit some benefit-of-the-doubt if we don't initially understand it. Someone took time out of their life to create it, and presumably were attempting to convey some actual meaning. AI (at present) doesn't know what "meaning" even is. Generating mountains of output with it is cheap. Analyzing it is a trap—there's no other to try to understand and appreciate. It's an accident that happens to resemble something with intent behind it. I think that's part of why people react so poorly to it, and especially to trying to pass its output off as human-generated. (Spoilers for Watts' Blindsight) In Blindsight, the (intelligent but non-conscious) aliens think human communication is some kind of adversarial gibberish intended to mimic meaning in order to tie up opponents' resources with nonsense. Just chaff, basically. They're not able to understand the not-directly-and-strictly-business output of a consciousness as anything else, because they're used to a universe of intelligent but non-conscious actors. Today, that's what our AI tools actually do, as far as what they're capable of doing without extensive human adjustment and editing. They are, by far, at their most-efficient when used to generate noise. That noise may be useful for some purpose, but it's not any good purpose, because it's only useful at that kind of scale in cases where truth and meaning aren't valuable. [EDIT] For comparison, look at other forms of communication where humans go out of their way to avoid meaning. It's pretty much all reviled: marketing-speak, lawyer-speak, politician-speak, HR-speak, et c. |