For the last several months the hot new toy in tech has been artificial intelligence, or AI.
Throughout 2023 and into 2024 it seems like every other month a new AI tool was being announced. Whether it was Chat GPT 'writing' short stories or Midjourney AI using stable diffusion to generate 'art', everyone was freaking out about how good the AIs were getting.
This mania was further fuelled by people in the tech industry, who are developing AI, who began making sweeping claims about the ultimate capabilities of their products. There were claims AI would replace thousands of jobs and that AI would be able to become an everyday assistant for your ever need. Even during the Hollywood strikes, there was real concern expressed on the picket lines in a few years companies would just be able to create entire movies using AI actors, written by AI writers, using AI-generated special effects.
Yet, it sure seems like that's not going to be the case though, right?
As a creative person who works in media, I obviously wasn't a big fan of the idea of say, an AI writer replacing me as a journalist or AI Artists' replacing visual artists. Yet even back then part of me felt like this was just the latest fad, the latest tech bubble and that one day soon, it would burst. As much as we call it 'artificial intelligence' AI is not actually intelligent.
In books, movies and television writers have explored the idea of artificial intelligence and how it would interact with humanity. Some took the stance AI would harm humanity, manifested in characters like HAL-9000 and Skynet. Others imagined worlds where humans and AI coexisted such as in the case of Star Wars' droids or in I, Robot where an artificial being gains true sentience.
Actual AI is not like that. They are instead more akin to calculators that mimic human behaviour and art. Chat GPT, for example, simply writes word by word using millions of human writings it sampled to guess what word would make the most sense to come next. It also has a rather predictable tendency to get facts wrong or simply make up false answers.
Chatbots do the same thing. Famously an Air Canada chatbot once told a customer they could claim a refund when, in fact, they could not. The internet also delights in playing with such bots and can train them to be either an outright Nazi or a dyed-in-the-wool communist with comparatively little effort.
Recently Google started integrating AI into its search systems resulting in humourous and concerning results, such as the AI telling you that glue is a great ingredient in a pizza. While that is, to most people, clearly nonsense it does make me wonder what will happen when its falsehoods are less obvious.
The truth is that, with our technology today, we will not be using AI in everyday life within five years like the smartphone. It will certainly be a tool some companies and apps make use of but, in many cases, simply having a human do it won't only be cheaper and more efficient, but better.
After all, human connection both online and in person is what society, art and social media are supposed to be all about. Why on earth would we want to have AI messing with that?
