Did users demonstrate an interest in any of this? Have they demonstrated an interest in any of the myriad applications generative tech has been shoehorned into?

I like Cory Dransfeldt’s site. I disagree with a ton of things he says. This is a great example.

I have a lot of uncertainty around various ways we’re using LLMs and other new generative models. But the critique, “Did anyone want this?” is the height of “I am living within a filter bubble.”

ChatGPT has 600 million monthly active users— and that’s DOWN. They reached 100 million users in just 2 months.

I haven’t caught all the way up to what Apple released— but I saw things like grammar checking, summarization, and removing subjects from photos (presumably using generative fill) — these uses have tons of users. A lot of people want these things. How many people use things like priority inboxes on Gmail?

We can debate the environmental impact, the ethics of how these models are being built, privacy concerns, and the actual quality of the output (actual generated art is a thing I see a ton of online, much of it bad, and I’m not sure much of anything is better for it).

But the idea that these features are just some kind of AI-like hallucination on the part of Wall Street that is not reflected in ways real people want to use computers? That’s willful ignorance.