With today’s so-called generative artificial intelligence, we’re being told that we have finally arrived. We’re now beginning to build true “thinking machines,” machines that will do everything a human can do, only better, faster, and more efficiently. This will change every aspect of our lives, for good…or for bad. Either way, there’s no turning back. We can’t stop generative AI. Only learn to live with it.

This is not true. Today’s machines are far more powerful than those in the past, but their so-called “intelligence” is not like yours or mine.

The belief that they can or soon will become "intelligent" is a myth being used to obscure what so-called generative AI actually is, how it works, and what the companies behind it are really up to. AI companies are using the hype around artificial intelligence to build computer infrastructure, rewrite laws, and alter norms that will fundamentally change how we work, recreate, communicate…And ultimately, how we think about what it means to be human.

None of this is inevitable. The changes being brought on by so-called generative artificial intelligence are not the result of some forward march of technological progress, but instead of decisions and values that we all have a say in.

This is Media Objects. A Ways of Knowing podcast. Produced by the World According to Sound, in partnership with Media Studies at Cornell University. Support from the college of arts and science and the society for the humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Guests include Cornell professors Gili Vidan and Chris Csikszentmihalyi.