shouldn't AI be busy curing cancer or something?
I've also thought of the same, and I actually have certain possible answers to this very question. There can be multiple reasons why AI is writing books and making art when it should technically be curing diseases.
First of all, AI research is expensive, so companies invest in research that gives immediate and visible results—like generating text or images. A chatbot sells instantly; a cancer detection AI won’t because it'll have to go through a long testing process.
Curing diseases or solving scientific problems demands concrete data. The AI of today is definitely not capable of that. On the other hand, text or art is forgiving. A story can be “sort of right” or just “bad,” but a diagnosis cannot be anything except correct.
AI learns from available data. Ignoring the obvious legal complications, this is a major reason why LLMs and image generators evolved first—because of the massive amount of such data available.
Then there is the very obvious problem of human nature. “AI wrote a book” will make headlines. The attention will be massive; any attention is good, be it negative or positive. Companies definitely want attention at the current stage. On the other hand, “AI optimized molecular biology” is something that would certainly fascinate people but wouldn’t keep them hooked for long.
And I also believe it’s because humans have the tendency of “Play first, innovate later.” Basically, AI is a toy, and we’re in the playing phase. It’s historically accurate. The internet didn’t blow up because of research sharing—it blew up because of memes and social networks.
I’m fairly certain that people investing in AI believe it will become the new norm, that it will be used in everything. OpenAI makes no money, and ChatGPT is still in its prototype phase. They’re basically conditioning the global market to slowly accept AI. A few years ago, AI images were absolute garbage, and no one would accept an AI cover—but now we’ve come to, “Maybe if it’s not monetized, it’s alright,” and soon we’ll reach, “I mean, it’s fine even if it is monetized, AI is just a tool for efficiency after all.”
The robot–AI uprising trope we’ve constantly seen in movies and stories is basically an exaggeration. For the AI uprising has already started. The world won’t be physically destroyed; literal robots won’t take over and make humans their slaves—but the online world, the internet, has already begun to be dominated by AI. Soon enough, the time will come when humans won’t be able to do anything without it, because it will have become the daily norm. In a way, AI will enslave humanity.
Perhaps philosophers years in the future will say, “Thousands of stories warned them against it, yet they went ahead and did what they were told not to.”
's and giggles my husband put one of my PNR novels (written circa 2009) through AI writing detection software. It came back as 90% AI generated, despite the fact it was written by me before the concept of AI being used (it doesn't write books by itself) to write books was even a twinkle in someone's eye. I was horrified and really kinda offended that my carefully crafted and fanatically edited work was so 'precise' it was considered by the software as AI generated.
