Should We Slow Down AI Development?

Depending on what corner of the internet you’re hanging out in these days, you are likely to find one of the three following groups:

• people who are absolutely not talking about GPT or OpenAI and do not knowingly interact with AI in their day-to-day lives,

• people who are enthusiastic about the progress of late represented by an explosion of generative tools allowing many of them to finally express their ideas or more efficiently produce content,

• and people who are seeing the rapid spread and adoption, and its flaws, as problematic in some way and take that to mean we should put the breaks on.

When it comes to this latter group, it’s important to consider their motivations. There are a number of reasons why they say they’re interested in halting AI development right where it is. Usually, their reasoning is somewhere on the scale of protecting their IP to protecting knowledge workers’ jobs to slowing it down so they can develop their own competing AI.