There's an old saying that I'm sure you've heard, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

But imitation can easily tip into forgery. In the art world, there have been many talented foragers

over the years. The Dutch painter Han von Mageren, a master forgeron of the 20th century, was so good that his paintings were certified and sold, often to Nazis, as works by Johann Vermeer, a 17th century Dutch master. Now there is a new kind of art forgery happening, and the perpetrators are machines.

I recently got back from San Francisco, the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom. I was out

there to do a live show, which you may have heard in our feed, and also to attend the annual

American Economic Association conference. Everywhere you go in San Francisco, there are

billboards for AI companies. The conference itself was similarly blanketed. There were sessions

called economic implications of AI, artificial intelligence and finance, and large

language models and generative AI. The economist Eric Brinjolfson is one of the leading

scholars in this realm, and we borrowed him for our live show to hear his views on AI.

The idea is that, you know, AI is doing these amazing things, but we want to do it in

service of humans and make sure that we keep humans at the center of all of that.

The day after Brynjolfson came on our show, I attended one of his talks at the conference.

It was called Will AI Save Us or Destroy Us?

He cited a book by the Oxford computer scientist Michael Woldridge called A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. Brinjolfson read from

a list of problems that Woldridge said AI was nowhere near solving. Here are a few of them.

Understanding a story and answering questions about it, human-level

automated translation, interpreting what is going on in a photograph. As Bern-Yolfson is reading

this list from the lectern, you're thinking, wait a minute, AI has solved all those problems,

hasn't it? And that's when Brinjolfson gets to his

punchline. The Wildridge book was published way back in 2021. The pace of AI's advance has been

astonishing, and some people expect it to supercharge our economy. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated economic growth over the current decade of around 1.5% a year.

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