I’d like to throw my battered old hat into the ring regarding the debate on A.I (Artificial Intelligence) and it’s place in modern society.
Let me make my stance perfectly clear right from the off. I bloody well hate it! No, hold on, hate is too gentle a sentiment. I loathe, abhor, detest and despise A.I with a passion. I feel it has no place in modern society or any kind of society at all come to that. Like farting in a lift, it’s wrong on every level.
Oh sure, you can do all sorts of cools things with A.I but they all pretty much require the absolute minimum effort from the creator. For example – Chat GPT will write a 300-page novel for you in just a couple of minutes with only the barest amount of information, but where is the sense of achievement in that? Any semi-illiterate halfwit can now become a novelist with a bit of basic knowledge of how the software works.
I have read parts of some of these A.I generated novels and believe me, Dickens they ain’t. It’s the kind of output an over-enthusiastic 16-year-old English Literature student might put out on an off day. I mean, where’s the craft? The intricate plot? The interesting and fully fleshed out characters? None of those things are present in these books. I would never advocate for the burning of books but where they are concerned I just might be prepared to make an exception.
But it’s happening all the same and even platforms like Amazon and Ingram Spark are readily accepting books written by a computer program rather than a human being. I think its appalling and yet again shows what a self-centred and lazy species human beings are becoming.
But here’s the rub!
Those A.I programs are written by humans in the first place. And that being the case then is A.I actually a thing? When you buy fruit and veg at a supermarket, it will do you good when you eat it but it wouldn’t even exist if another human hadn’t gone to the trouble of growing it in the first place. And it’s the same with A.I. I’m sure the day will eventually dawn that A.I starts to write it’s own programs and for all I know that may already be the case and I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
The biggest problem I have with A.I at the moment, other than it encouraging laziness, is that most of it is complete shite. It’s rubbish and I’m not just talking about the books. A.I generated images and videos are so obvious that you would need a frontal lobotomy to not be able to tell what is real and what is not.
I saw one of these videos on social media recently. It was of a great white shark that had swam up to a boat and the people on the boat were leaning out and petting the shark on the nose. There were two major problems with it though.
1. The people on the boats would now be walking round with only one arm each.
2. The shark had no gills.
Now, you could, possibly, argue against the first problem. You might say that the shark had already eaten and was full of seal and therefore merely curious about the people on the boat. That would be a probability. But the shark is a fish and needs gills to breathe underwater and so problem number 2 blows the video out of the water (no pun intended.)
So A.I, as yet, isn’t so clever as people think it is.
But it’s getting there. The time will come, it’s inevitable, that you won’t be able to tell the difference. One day the shark will have gills. And where shall we be then? Eh? Answer me that!
For the moment though, it is still possible to spot the A.I fakes, even these deep fake news stories where words are put in people’s mouths. Donald Trump has been ranting on about them since he had his first term in office but as yet, I don’t see what the buffoon has to worry about. Like I say, you’d have to be a special kind of gullible to believe them at the moment.
The truth about A.I is that its not actually all that new. Aren’t search engines A.I? You type a question into Google or Yahoo and the search result instantly shows up with potentially thousands of options. And what of Alexa and Siri and all the other voice activated personal assistants? I use Alexa a lot, mostly for music, news and weather reports but I also ask her all sorts or questions to which she invariably knows the answer 99 times out of 100. Even this eleven-year-old laptop that I’m using to type this post on, and every personal computer that has ever gone before it, is surely A.I in its rawest form. I open MS Word, I type the letters A, L, A and N and behold, they appear on the page on screen. In fact, I haven’t actually written anything, I’ve just tapped a few keys and my name is there in black and white. The software has done it for me.
It’s not that simple though, is it?
I use a laptop nearly every day and I don’t consider my writing to be a product of A.I, it’s merely the tool I use to get the job done. It’s my drill, my socket set and sometimes my hammer. I’m the one who uses the tool to my advantage. And that brings me back to the A.I books. I may be using a form of A.I (computer) but I’m putting in the hours and the effort to write a 300-page novel. That can take me anywhere between 6 to 9 months, give or take, compared to the mere 5 minutes it would take Chat GPT to produce the same length of book but of a far inferior quality.
There are of course, as with everything, some positives to A.I such as its use of providing improved medical diagnosis and data to help tackle climate change to name just two. Ok, hands up, I think that’s great and if A.I was used solely within scientific constructs then I wouldn’t have such a problem with it.
One day, eventually, someone will come up with a positive use for all A.I beyond the ones that are currently benefitting from it, such as the medical profession and meteorologists, that will benefit all of mankind, but I think that day is still quite far off. It’s good that A.I is used in that way and the technology that A.I employs is truly incredible and very sophisticated but if the majority of us are simply going to use it for churning out rubbish books and naff sea life videos, then count me out.