https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/06/ai-janky-web/683228/
Nattei Wong has a fantastic write-up that is a bit of a different take on the societal impact of generative AI. Instead of yet another article on the dumbing down of humanity, instead, Wong alerts us to our increased tolerance of errors, mistakes, hallucinations, and general shoddy solutions that AI is generating. For some reason, though we have little tolerance of other humans making mistakes, we’re seemingly OK with AI making mistakes, deeming it all as acceptable.
The opening paragraph says it all:
A car that accelerates instead of braking every once in a while is not ready for the road. A faucet that occasionally spits out boiling water instead of cold does not belong in your home. Working properly most of the time simply isn’t good enough for technologies that people are heavily reliant upon. And two and a half years after the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI is becoming such a technology.
His final take – AI is in a dangerous zone, noting, “They may not be wrong frequently enough to be jettisoned, but they also may not be wrong rarely enough to ever be fully trusted.“
The concern here is something we’re already seeing among the population using generative AI chatbots—we’re becoming “beta” as we become accustomed to and accept mediocrity. When it makes mistakes, we just say, “Oh yeah, it hallucinates. Oh well.”