Inevitable? The tech industry is desperately trying to make AI happen
The push for AI is not driven by real consumer demand, but by tech companies trying not to burst their own bubble. Meta’s disastrous Muse Image flop is the perfect example.
Anthony Albanese announced an Australia-first approach to AI this week, which will involve fast-tracking data centre approvals and launching a national Office of AI to attempt to regulate the sector. The government says it will not allow big tech companies to gobble up the work of Australian writers, musicians, artists, and everyone else, but just how it plans to do that remains… unknown. There is a passionate campaign by Australian creatives urging the government to protect their copyright – their work is more than just an AI “input”. Each individual creator should get to decide if they want to give their work to the Tech Gods or not (and for how much money).
I think the “output” side of the generative AI equation is equally worth considering.
The big tech companies want free access to creative work, to your images and photos, to produce… what output, exactly? The products that tech companies have so far offered to “everyday” users have not been very compelling. Many AI tools don’t appear to have much demand – certainly not enough to justify the huge costs (financial, environmental and social) and mind-boggling investment figures.
We have a very recent example of this.
On July 7, Meta launched its generative AI image model, “Muse Image”. It would allow your public images and videos on Instagram to be used by strangers to make AI-generated content without your permission. It took Meta about 72 hours to reverse the decision, after the immediate backlash and many viral Instagram posts showing users how to opt-out via the settings that Meta had quietly changed for all users with public accounts. By July 10, Meta disabled the new feature. Good!
Meta is apparently the sixth biggest company in the world, and yet it could not even come up with an AI feature that its users actually want. Why? CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the answer himself at a company town hall earlier this month.
Earlier in the year Meta laid off 8000 workers, anticipating that their jobs could be done by AI, and “reassigned” another 7000 to work on AI initiatives. But at this town hall, just over one month later, Zuckerberg told staff that “the trajectory of the agentic [AI] development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected”. Or, as Futurism wrote more simply in their headline: Zuckerberg Admits That AI Is Not Working Out the Way He Imagined. To top it all off, Meta will spend US$145 million on AI infrastructure this year alone.
These companies have gone all in. So AI tools, products and features are being forced into every aspect of your life because of corporate desperation to “make AI happen”.
