Ever since HAL 9000 in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ got on our last nerve with his uncooperative ways, and WOPR in WarGames’ took us to the brink of nuclear annihilation (before a rapid-fire game of Tic-Tac-Toe made it stand down), AI – or artificial intelligence – has been a bit of a bogeyman, lurking in the background.
‘The Terminator’, ‘RoboCop’ and ‘The Matrix’ did nothing to assuage our fears. Basically, one night we’ll go to sleep, and the next morning, the toaster will be calling the shots.
Thing is, it was all stuff of movies for decades, but now, it’s fast becoming a reality. Everywhere you turn, there are newspaper articles, TV documentaries and the likes of David Muir leaning in to the camera to report the latest. AI is changing the stock market; influencing staff hiring; and leading passengers to leap from self-driving cars before they get squished on train tracks that their Waymo mistook for a road.
As an aside, I’m beginning to realise that Keith Tibbetts got ahead of the curve by calling his local company AI Rentals – he’s getting brand recognition every day for free. You can’t get through 24 hours without those two vowels popping up somewhere.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am not an AI aficionado – far from it – but even with the technology getting more amazing by the moment, my Spidey-senses tingle when I see a video of someone’s pet ocelot flawlessly playing the piano. Which brings me to my next point … why is everyone sharing videos, stories and other ‘news’ as though they are fact, without thoroughly checking them first?
The early versions of this were when there would be some black-and-white shot of a celebrity like Anthony Hopkins or Audrey Hepburn above paragraphs of deeply sage advice. Very nicely written, but – in the end – none of those words had ever been near those stars. If they’d been written by, say, Jimmy Flingle, no one would have cared, but the (false) attribution gave them weight and led to them being reposted and shared thousands of times.
Just FYI, Hopkins did not write something that starts with: “None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an afterthought.” Neither did Keanu Reeves, Richard Gere or Christopher Walken, all of whom have had their byline plopped on top of it at some point.
Speaking of tales, a new trend you may have noticed is the Long Feel-Good Story. It used to be that there were genuine news items about a community rallying to buy a favourite gardener a new truck, or someone covering a single mother’s groceries at the checkout. They were short, sweet, and usually included a picture. Just brightened our days. Now, it seems that ChatGPT or similar has got involved, taking an already fake tale and spinning it into an Old Yeller saga. Guaranteed to pull on the heartstrings … and a complete load of old rubbish. I can’t remember where I saw this heading, but ‘The AI Slop Crisis’ completely sums it up.
“Tom Benjamin couldn’t stop smiling when he received the keys to his new truck …” becomes: “As the sun shone down, its rays caught the gleaming metal of the keys Tom Benjamin held in his shaking hand, casting a cascade of dancing light across the faces of the neighbours who were no longer just friends – they were family.”
Uggers.
Hey, listen – we could certainly use all the positive stories we can get, these days, but when they are falsehoods posing as truth, and designed to manipulate, that’s a different bucket of fish. Worse, when good people with the best intentions start sharing them, they are feeding the machine.
We need to be better about double-checking anything we’re putting out there, or we’re part of the problem.
That being said, once in a while we’ll stumble on an item that surely can’t be real, yet – by gum – it be! Anyone else contribute to the fundraiser for actor Mickey Rourke so he doesn’t get kicked out of his hacienda? If you hadn’t heard about it, I’ll leave you to Google, but it’s the genuine article. The only piece of the puzzle that’s a bit fuzzy is whether Rourke gave his permission for the GoFundMe initiative. He’s now saying he didn’t, but then allegedly he’s also stating he won’t take any film work unless it pays at least $200,000 a day, so perhaps the Rourkefort is sliding a little off the cracker.
I could get a job at Daily Mail just like that!
As I mentioned briefly earlier (see: Mozart ocelot), with tools becoming more powerful at an almost frightening rate, images and videos are being edited or created from scratch that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from the real thing. Pictures have been altered for years, so perhaps we’re a little more savvy with them (George Clooney plays the tuba??!), but still no fun when your head has been put on someone else’s naked body and it’s promoted as a secret nudie of you.
(And, for the record, I’d like to publicly reiterate that I have never worn purple underwear in my life.)
However, when videos come into the game, it’s scary on a whole ‘nother level. These deep fakes are created to illicit strong reactions from those who view them, who unfortunately post/comment immediately, driven by emotion rather than good sense. In a time when so many people seem seriously divided, the last thing we need is incendiary inventions like this making it worse.
It takes less than a minute to do a moment’s research, which will help you figure out if what you’re looking at is real or part of some person’s warped imagination. Truth can be stranger than fiction these days, so it’s up to us – the public – to separate the wheat from the chaff.
AI can be an amazing tool in the right hands, but that isn’t the problem, is it? As countless films have demonstrated, it just takes one rotten human to spoil the bunch, and then the machines can sit back and enjoy a cup of oil and a chat while we destroy ourselves. Only this week I read about the Tin Can, a ‘landline’ for kids that doesn’t have a screen and allows for children to communicate with their friends without the screens. Is going backwards, in some respects, the way forward?
Following that theory, I think we’ll revert to browning our bread on an open fire. The toaster has recently been overstepping; its days are numbered.