Cory DoctorowA key requirement for being a science fiction writer without losing your mind is the ability to distinguish between science fiction (futuristic thought experiments) and predictions. SF writers who lack this trait come to fancy themselves fortune-tellers who SEE! THE! FUTURE!
The thing is, sf writers cheat. We palm cards in order to set up pulp adventure stories that let us indulge our thought experiments. These palmed cards – say, faster-than-light drives or time-machines – are narrative devices, not scientifically grounded proposals.
The Coprophagic AI crisis by Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow reflects on the science fiction narrative device that ‘more training data’ can improve artificial intelligence arguing that it simply is not true.
What’s more, while the proposition that “more training data will linearly improve the quality of AI predictions” is a mere article of faith, “training an AI on the output of another AI makes it exponentially worse” is a matter of fact.
Source: The Coprophagic AI crisis by Cory Doctorow