If you had all the money in the world at your disposal, would you still be using ChatGPT?
As part of a recent report, first spotted by Inc. Magazine, financial holdings company JPMorgan asked 111 billionaire clients how they make use of artificial intelligence.
Their answers range from down-to-earth to absolutely absurd, forcing us to wonder if some of the wealthiest individuals on the planet could be suffering from AI-induced delusions.
Given the overwhelming enthusiasm among investors and a hype train that’s minting billionaires at an unprecedented rate, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that AI adoption is widespread among the upper crust. A whopping 79 percent of billionaires interviewed by JPMorgan said they “use AI in their personal lives,” while 69 percent said they use it for their businesses.
But exactly how they’re using the tech has us scratching our heads. Case in point, one billionaire enthused that they were using AI to “design a blueprint for a plane they hope to build.”
Given the tech’s widely-documented shortcomings, including its strong tendency to make up facts on the spot, we have our doubts that a generative AI will come up with coherent plans for a plane that can actually fly. As a reminder, we’re talking about tools that can’t reliably tell truth from fiction and are still being caught making enormous factual errors, despite untold billions in investments.
Another billionaire told JPMorgan that they were using AI as a “toy” to “create bedtime stories customized for my son.” Those stories allegedly always have an “emotional twist at the end.” (Child development experts have warned parents against relying on AI for child rearing.)
That’s right: even with practically unlimited financial resources at their disposal, billionaires are resorting to an AI chatbot to come up with derivative slop for their children. Are the top one percent really that cheap? Given their incomes, they could easily afford commissioning entire children’s books tailored to their children’s desires and interests — yet here we are, with billionaires using ChatGPT to generate bedtime stories.
“The currency of life is time,” one billionaire told JPMorgan. “It is not money.”
“You think carefully about how you spend one dollar. You should think just as carefully as how you spend one hour,” they added.
The report also outlines a case in which an “AI-generated report helped avoid $100,00 in legal research costs,” a dubious claim that raises plenty of questions. After all, we’ve already seen the tech being exploited by legal professionals to cite hallucinated cases in court.
In an even more eyebrow-raising anecdote, one billionaire family is apparently “working with an AI team to develop holograms of elder family members for future generations,” according to the report.
Fortunately, not every billionaire interviewee appears to have lost their mind. Some of them have chosen to “avoid computers and rely on manual calculation or intuition,” admitting that AI can “sometimes hinder rather than help efficiency.”
One JPMorgan customer even went as far as dismissing artificial general intelligence — a nebulous and ill-defined point at which an AI can outperform a human, seen by many as the holy grail of the AI industry — as a “total and complete utter waste of time.”
Some are apparently even worried “about the trajectory of AI with regards to how many people may be put out of work and what that will do to society.”
How touching! We’re glad that those who’ve accumulated virtually unlimited personal wealth are worried about AI automation and the effects of mass unemployment.
Besides, who will design their airplanes when the AI inevitably falls short of coming up with the required blueprints?
More on billionaires: Numerous Billionaires Preparing for End of Society