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 forgers over the years.
The Dutch painter Han van Megeren, a master forger 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 Erik Brynjolfsson 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 Brynjolfsson 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 Wooldridge called A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence.
Brynjolfsson read from a list of problems that Wooldridge said AI was nowhere near.
Here are a few of understanding a story and answering questions about it.
Human level, Automated translation Interpreting what is going on in a photograph, as Brynjolfsson is reading this list from the lectern.
You're thinking, wait a minute, AI has solved all those problems, hasn't it?