A pocket calculator is already “extremely impressive” in its ability to calculate fast and precisely, compared to a human. The reasons we are typically not impressed is that (a) we are already used to this, and (b) most people don’t care about calculations.
To revert this, an “extremely impressive” output is one that is not merely beyond human abilities, but also something humans care about (does not need to be actually useful, just the kind of thing which—if done by a human—would increase its author’s status among the target population). And it must be new, but if we are thinking about new things, we will get that automatically. Just saying that a thing that would be “extremely impressive” tomorrow, may still be taken for granted five years later.
I think it will also depend on how much attribution the AI will get. Because the results will most likely be produced by a team of humans using an AI. The public perception will be different if the output is framed as “a group of smart scientists/artists/whatever created X using modern technology” or “an artificial intelligence created X, and these people provided the input parameters and did some debugging”. I suspect that humans will have an obvious incentive to say the former, unless they are explicitly in the business of selling AIs.
A pocket calculator is already “extremely impressive” in its ability to calculate fast and precisely, compared to a human. The reasons we are typically not impressed is that (a) we are already used to this, and (b) most people don’t care about calculations.
To revert this, an “extremely impressive” output is one that is not merely beyond human abilities, but also something humans care about (does not need to be actually useful, just the kind of thing which—if done by a human—would increase its author’s status among the target population). And it must be new, but if we are thinking about new things, we will get that automatically. Just saying that a thing that would be “extremely impressive” tomorrow, may still be taken for granted five years later.
I think it will also depend on how much attribution the AI will get. Because the results will most likely be produced by a team of humans using an AI. The public perception will be different if the output is framed as “a group of smart scientists/artists/whatever created X using modern technology” or “an artificial intelligence created X, and these people provided the input parameters and did some debugging”. I suspect that humans will have an obvious incentive to say the former, unless they are explicitly in the business of selling AIs.