I've been trying to figure out how to retool the story to fit a timeline where ubiquitous AI that can write poems and paint pictures predates ubiquitous self-driving cars.
That will likely always be the case. Even 100% synthetic data has to come from somewhere. Great synopsis! Working for hire to feed a machine that regurgitates variations of the missing data sounds dystopian. But here we are, almost there.
1. Interacting with the randomness of the world
and
2. Thinking a lot, going in loops and thought loops and seeing what they discover.
I don't expect them to need humans forever.
Hallucinations are highly creative as well. But unless the technology changes, large language models will need human-made training substrate data for a long time to operate.
As of now, the models still need large amounts of human produced creative works for training. So you can imagine a story set in a world where large swathes of humanity are regulated to being basically gig workers for some quadrillion dollar AI megacorp where they sit around and wait to be prompted by the AI. "Draw a purple cat with pink stripes and a top hat" and then millions of freelance artists around the world start drawing a stupid picture of a cat because the model determined that it had insufficient training data to produce high quality results for the given prompt. And that's how everyone lives their lives....just working to feed the model but everything consumed is generated by the model. It's rather dystopian.