Mixed reviews re. AI/emerging technology in the Art World. Some are enthusiastic supporters, some feel it may eventually become an existential threat. Please see below article from today's NY Times:
Seems like there are AI articles coming out virtually every day! Please read today's NY Times article below. I've provided an excerpt for us to reflect upon:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/02/magazine/07mag-talk-marcus.html
What do you think the 2024 presidential election looks like in a world of A.I.-generated misinformation and deepfakes? A [expletive] show. A train wreck. You probably saw the Trump arrest photos. And The Guardian had a piece about what their policy is going to be as people make fake Guardian articles, because they know this is going to happen. People are going to make fake New York Times articles, fake CBS News videos. We had already seen hints of that, but the tools have gotten better. So we’re going to see a lot more of it — also because the cost of misinformation is going to zero.
You can imagine candidates’ dismissing factual reporting that is troublesome to them as being A.I. fakery. Yeah, if we don’t do something, the default is that by the time the election comes around in 2024, nobody’s going to believe anything, and anything they don’t want to believe they’re going to reject as being A.I.-generated. Aand the problems we have around civil discourse and polarization are just going to get worse.
So what do we do? We’re going to need watermarking for video. For text, it’s going to be really hard; it’s hard to make machines that can detect the difference between something generated by a person and something generated by a machine, but we should try to watermark as best we can and track provenance. That’s one. No. 2 is we’re going to have to have laws that are going to make a lot of people uncomfortable because they sound like they’re in conflict with our First Amendment — and maybe they are. But I think we’re going to have to penalize people for mass-scale harmful misinformation. I don’t think we should go after an individual who posts a silly story on Facebook that wasn’t true. But if you have troll farms and they put out a hundred million fake pieces of news in one day about vaccines — I think that should be penalizable. We don’t really have laws around that, and we need to in the way that we developed laws around spam and telemarketing. We don’t have rules on a single call, but we have rules on telemarketing at scale. We need rules on distributing misinformation at scale.
Thank you s o much for the link and the excerpt above about AI and fake media articles, videos. Wow! It is eye opening isn't it? Disturbing too. Wow!
Without meaning to stoke too much concern, I do think we may be entering a brand new phase globally. Short-term AI may create quite a bit of social dislocation & chaos (labor markets undermined, etc.), deliberate mass misinformation being put out on the web and, consequently, increased social polarization, mistrust and paralysis. After all, if you can't believe your eyes and the major media, who can you trust? Our old ways of 'believing what we see & hear' will be undermined, our skills may become increasingly obsolescent and bad actors may take advantage. Longer-term, I have hopes this will give birth to a new sense of urgency about the sacredness of protecting the Truth and the sacredness of human effort. The fact that technological progress can occur doesn't mean that it should occur w/out thinking through the social, psychological and economic consequences. Also, the fate of Humanity should not lie in the hands of a few self-interested Tech companies! Their profitability is inconsequential compared to humanity at large. We need new laws put into effect. I suspect we are all in for a very bumpy ride.
Interesting Opinion piece by Thomas Friedman in NY Times re. climate change and AI:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/opinion/ai-tech-climate-change.html
Interesting article in The New Yorker which came out recently. Makes the argument that advances in AI may only serve to widen the economic discrepancy between Capitalists and Labor:
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey
Here are some excerpts to consider:
Is there a way for A.I. to do something other than sharpen the knife blade of capitalism? Just to be clear, when I refer to capitalism, I’m not talking about the exchange of goods or services for prices determined by a market, which is a property of many economic systems. When I refer to capitalism, I’m talking about a specific relationship between capital and labor, in which private individuals who have money are able to profit off the effort of others. So, in the context of this discussion, whenever I criticize capitalism, I’m not criticizing the idea of selling things; I’m criticizing the idea that people who have lots of money get to wield power over people who actually work. And, more specifically, I’m criticizing the ever-growing concentration of wealth among an ever-smaller number of people, which may or may not be an intrinsic property of capitalism but which absolutely characterizes capitalism as it is practiced today.
As it is currently deployed, A.I. often amounts to an effort to analyze a task that human beings perform and figure out a way to replace the human being. Coincidentally, this is exactly the type of problem that management wants solved. As a result, A.I. assists capital at the expense of labor. There isn’t really anything like a labor-consulting firm that furthers the interests of workers. Is it possible for A.I. to take on that role? Can A.I. do anything to assist workers instead of management?
Many people think that A.I. will create more unemployment, and bring up universal basic income, or U.B.I., as a solution to that problem. In general, I like the idea of universal basic income; however, over time, I’ve become skeptical about the way that people who work in A.I. suggest U.B.I. as a response to A.I.-driven unemployment. It would be different if we already had universal basic income, but we don’t, so expressing support for it seems like a way for the people developing A.I. to pass the buck to the government. In effect, they are intensifying the problems that capitalism creates with the expectation that, when those problems become bad enough, the government will have no choice but to step in. As a strategy for making the world a better place, this seems dubious.
You may remember that, in the run-up to the 2016 election, the actress Susan Sarandon—who was a fervent supporter of Bernie Sanders—said that voting for Donald Trump would be better than voting for Hillary Clinton because it would bring about the revolution more quickly. I don’t know how deeply Sarandon had thought this through, but the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said the same thing, and I’m pretty sure he had given a lot of thought to the matter. He argued that Trump’s election would be such a shock to the system that it would bring about change.
What Žižek advocated for is an example of an idea in political philosophy known as accelerationism. There are a lot of different versions of accelerationism, but the common thread uniting left-wing accelerationists is the notion that the only way to make things better is to make things worse. Accelerationism says that it’s futile to try to oppose or reform capitalism; instead, we have to exacerbate capitalism’s worst tendencies until the entire system breaks down. The only way to move beyond capitalism is to stomp on the gas pedal of neoliberalism until the engine explodes.
I suppose this is one way to bring about a better world, but, if it’s the approach that the A.I. industry is adopting, I want to make sure everyone is clear about what they’re working toward. By building A.I. to do jobs previously performed by people, A.I. researchers are increasing the concentration of wealth to such extreme levels that the only way to avoid societal collapse is for the government to step in. Intentionally or not, this is very similar to voting for Trump with the goal of bringing about a better world. And the rise of Trump illustrates the risks of pursuing accelerationism as a strategy: things can get very bad, and stay very bad for a long time, before they get better. In fact, you have no idea of how long it will take for things to get better; all you can be sure of is that there will be significant pain and suffering in the short and medium term.
A positive article in Business Insider re. AI advances:
"Workers in a study got an AI Assistant. They became happier, more productive and less likely to quit".
An online course has introduced me to creating art with AI images. I see great applications for education, and illustration. My new profile picture was made with an AI program.
Looks beautiful!!
No doubt AI has many beneficial and positive applications for the Arts, legal research, essay writing, medical diagnoses and drug development among other areas. It can remove alot of relative drudgery of some jobs freeing humans to strategize or be creative. I've mentioned its NEGATIVE potential previously but there is also plenty of POSITIVE applications as well.
For all we know, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) may be able to solve our current climate crisis one day?
Ummm...
Speaking of the Air Force, a new report shows that it tested a drone enabled by artificial intelligence to destroy specific targets, but when a human operator tried to override the drone’s mission, https://Crooked.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D8855a23519ab892dfe2cd34f6%26id%3D3f05ab9dc0%26e%3D5d1bbcc1a5&source=gmail&ust=1685761833953000&usg=AOvVaw1K9dymueOiJwIjx9bNoKr J">the A.I. ordered the drone to attack the human operator so the mission could be completed. Hasta la vista, baby?
Ummm...
Speaking of the Air Force, a new report shows that it tested a drone enabled by artificial intelligence to destroy specific targets, but when a human operator tried to override the drone’s mission, https://Crooked.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D8855a23519ab892dfe2cd34f6%26id%3D3f05ab9dc0%26e%3D5d1bbcc1a5&source=gmail&ust=1685761833953000&usg=AOvVaw1K9dymueOiJwIjx9bNoKr J">the A.I. ordered the drone to attack the human operator so the mission could be completed. Hasta la vista, baby?
According to the Air Force, this did not actually happen. What happened was a colonel was giving a talk and described this sitation as a possible scenario: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65789916
This is about four rogue technocrat billionnaires who are creating a false reality to control the rest of us. It's not fun to read about it, but if we are to journey towards light, as I believe we are doing, it is good to know where the land mines are, and who has laid them.
These four are not the only rogues. But it helps to see the loosely laid out organization chart of rogue-ness.
@isabelle I noticed that the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's Newscorps company did a puff piece on Elon Musk a few days ago, saying that the Tesla was by far the best EV car. Well it's not, and it was a good reminder to stop reading the Wall Street Journal.
Yes, you are absolutely correct. Seems the billionaires of the world make sure to look after each other very well. Like a feudal system with income disparity only getting worse. Plus they have the means to manipulate/weaponize the media.
@jeanne-mayell I’m very late to comment on this but the question is no less relevant then a year ago. I love science fiction. Even studied it in university. I grew up watching The Odyssey, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek… if you can’t get your hands on the graphic novel ‘The Surrogates’ you should try watching the Bruce Willis movie of the same name. Bottom line is we’re all participating in a means to someone else’s end. Even while I’m reading and typing this comment. I think the best way to take back control is to learn all we can about AI and ask who’s using it, who’s providing the service, for what purpose and what do they have to gain by letting us “borrow” the technology? Being self aware while we’re online is key. Also, taking breaks from it or asking “ what offline activity could I replace being online right now?” I get the irony but does the good outweigh the bad? I get to be part of this group. Like minds that might never connect spiritually if I never started poking around online. Besides, who wants to live forever?