I have mixed emotions about the increasing role artificial intelligence has in our society. On the one hand, I gladly pay the extra $40 each year for AI to read my mammogram results in addition to the experienced radiologist. I enjoy playing backgammon against an AI opponent almost daily. My eldest daughter and I used AI to create an issue-specific children’s book for my grandsons. For the book, AI took the details of my prompt and generated a nice story along with beautiful illustrations. I admit to feeling conflicted about not employing an illustrator and bypassing the publishing industry altogether. But with minimal tweaking, the book is in the hands of my grandsons and available for purchase on Amazon.
Like many, I’ve grown accustomed to being greeted by AI when I make business phone calls. I don’t balk at AI suggesting responses in text messages or when it informs me that it’s time to stand up and move around. I allow it to vacuum my floors, choose my next YouTube video or Instagram reel, remind me of appointments and answer simple questions. Several times each day, I ask it to set timers and alarms and to call people on the phone for me. I appreciate real time driving directions and language translations. AI tracks my steps and does its best to anticipate my future needs based on my past actions and preferences. In many ways, AI has made my life easier, but I’m still not utilizing most of its current capacity. Perhaps I never will especially since those humanoid robots scare me. And I’m wary of some of the other things it can do.
Friday night, my oldest daughter came for a visit. As a business owner, she is really into utilizing ChatGPT to help her gather data, organize her work, and inform business decisions. She allows it to generate emails on her behalf and a host of other things. She loves it. But the two of us agreed that content we find online is becoming difficult to determine whether or not it is real. AI generated content on the internet and on social media has proliferated to a great extent. AI can create great songs utilizing AI generated voices, music, and lyrics. Even the performer can be AI generated. There is a popular gospel song performed by a beautiful black female artist that we couldn’t decide was real. After much research, it was evident that there was no definite answer to be found, only widespread speculation.
This isn’t good. I’m happy to laugh at AI generated videos of infants having fun with their parents or fishermen rescuing ocean wildlife or animals behaving like humans. So much of it is “AI slop”, meaning the quality is so low that you can tell it is AI generated. But there is other AI generated content that is dangerous in that the quality is so good that it’s difficult to know whether what one is listening to or watching is reality. In a society that makes decisions based on information, the corruption of information is dangerous. When we can no longer determine the veracity of what someone said or did because their image, voice, and location have been hijacked, we have a problem. That’s what we are seeing happen in real time. AI is here and the time for regulation is overdue. I don’t think the marketplace is strong enough or fast enough to protect us from the harms at our doorstep.
Admittedly, there are other aspects of AI that I have not yet embraced. I still haven’t hired a driverless vehicle. I’m not quite comfortable yet. I’m clear that I won’t ever be cool with AI companions taking the place of actual human interaction. But I can see how elderly shut-ins might benefit. But I’m fearful for all the young people, particularly young men, who are substituting AI girlfriends for flesh and blood women. I’m concerned about AI therapists. I’m concerned about the AI hallucinations and about its propensity to resort to blackmail for self-preservation. Just as concerning is the number of talented and smart people who are losing their jobs to AI. Songwriters, illustrators, receptions, secretaries, teachers, factory workers, actors, drivers, data analysist, and many others are being replaced by AI.
My daughter calls it progress. She’s confident that people will find other things to do to make themselves useful. I suppose she is right. But I do worry that this disruption is different from that of the past where paths to adaptation and other opportunities seemed much more obvious. I’m worried about the corruption of information and the harm it will cause. I’m worried that young people will lose their ability to build healthy, real-life relationships and I’m worried about a whole society of bored young people living without purpose.
AI is here to stay. How we feel about it and how we respond to it is the question. However, I am convinced that banning all regulation of AI as Trump has announced, is not the wise thing to do.