- United States
- Calif.
- Letter
Governor Newsom just announced a plan to “harness the power of GenAI to address homelessness”. This plan goes beyond being a waste of time and money, and is actively harmful to California and its residents. Generative AI is a dead-end technology that produces unreliable information at enormous energy costs. Generative AI has made headlines recently telling people to put glue and rocks on their pizza, and its developers have admitted they have no way to prevent these blatant and dangerous falsehoods from being presented to users. Additionally, Generative AI is a massive copyright nightmare, sucking up massive numbers of unlicensed books, essays, and magazines in futile pursuit of improved wording. This is a technology that has no place being used to make any governmental decisions, and this plan will waste valuable government time and money stroking the egos of Silicon Valley. Instead of solving California’s problems, Generative AI will create new ones when buggy AI-written code is rolled out for crucial computer systems, and effective human workers are replaced with buggy, unreliable chatbots that are fundamentally incapable of discerning whether the information they provide is correct or even reasonable. Generative AI is hated by everyone who is forced to use it in their places of work, who widely state it creates more pointless busywork and frustrates customers who prefer a human touch. Generative AI cannot solve the problems Governor Newsom is throwing it at, and wasting time with it uses up resources that could be invested in actual evidence-based solutions like streamlining construction of new housing and fighting rising costs of living.
