Will AI be just a source of amusement, or doom the entire planet?
With an innocent bliss known only to toddlers and journalism majors, I continue to be unworried about artificial intelligence that many fear will destroy the human race.
Some of this is because, lacking a scientific mind, I have no ability to conjure the great terrors that technology gurus express when warning that AI will inevitably develop, so to speak, a mind of its own and run roughshod over its creators. It still seems to me that you could just pull the plug out of the wall or something and shut the whole movement down.
But the main reason I’m not concerned is that no one seems to be asking AI to do anything serious. It’s all games and parlor tricks and prompts along the lines of “Make up a Merle Haggard song about wet bikini tops.”
For all we know, ChatGPT has the knowledge to cure cancer, but nobody's thought to ask.
No, instead we’re figuring out ways to foil 17-year-old boys who are using it to cheat on their English Comp papers.
Technology we can only escape by moving to Mars?
The Washington Post’s tech writer Geoffrey Fowler just spent who knows how many otherwise-productive hours creating a personalized Christmas card that, quite frankly, looks like something you could have obtained by stepping into one of those novelty photo booths on a New Jersey boardwalk. (In one failed effort, he said AI inexplicably stripped him of his pants.)
“And I’m not the only one using it for the holidays,” Fowler wrote. “AI selfie-generating app Lensa added a Christmas option that lets you transform yourself into a snow bunny or hunky Santa…”
This is the technology that’s supposed to doom us all? The technology that a former Google executive predicted we will only be able to escape by moving to Mars?
This is one area where our greed may save us. AI may indeed be capable of destroying the world, but as long as there’s no money in it, who’s going to bother sending it down that path?
If by “destroying the world” you mean drawing pictures of people without pants, OK, but who profits from, say, creating a fatal virus to wipe out organic intelligence? You’re telling me any self-respecting app developer or Russian hacker is going to waste his time on that?
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Will AI really let us 'commune with the dead'?
No, instead of killing people, we’re using AI to bring people back from the dead. Which in some cases may be worse.
“Some people are turning to AI technology as a way to commune with the dead,” writes The New York Times, “but its use as part of the mourning process has raised ethical questions while leaving some who have experimented with it unsettled.”
Experimented with it. Like maybe Lazarus was only the product of too many mushrooms. “Hey, man, like I can see him too.”
“HereAfter AI was introduced in 2019, two years after the debut of StoryFile, which produces interactive videos in which (deceased) subjects appear to make eye contact, breathe and blink as they respond to questions,” reports the Times. “Both generate answers from responses users gave to prompts like “Tell me about your childhood” and “What’s the greatest challenge you faced?”
This is eerily similar to a song written by the Austin Lounge Lizards 30 years ago about a dead ancestor brought back to life in the form of a hologram, back when they were all the rage:
“Always user friendly, though he hasn’t much to say;
We see much more of grandpa than before he passed away.”
Similarly, I guess, AI allows us to decouple from the guilt we feel for ignoring family members when they were still alive. Should have listened to the old man? No problem, you can do so now, years after you put him in the ground. And someone thinks that’s a good idea.
Now that I think about it, I was wrong; AI is going to doom us after all.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Tim Rowland: Is AI the end of the world as we know it?
