I’m Sorry Dave, That Was a Lie – Part 1

Can AI completely change the world?  I don’t mean like Skynet nuking all the cities.  I’m not talking about terminators slaughtering humans and rounding them up for extermination.  I mean will the routine use of AI radically change human society?

Some people will say it already has.  I spoke to a hiring manager who said that three of the four applicants for a job he was trying to fill used the same wording in their resume for how their experience was relevant for the position.  And I spoke to a teacher who said he routinely failed sixty percent of the homework he reviewed because it was obviously AI.

In a sense those who say it already has, are right.  The children have stopped using anything but their phones to interact with the world.  Wikipedia and Chat GPT are the ultimate authority and the only way to learn.  This is a real problem.  And the only way forward is to extract the electronic devices from these kids and make them use the knowledge or lack of knowledge to show what they know in a test.  In future, test rooms will be shielded from wi-fi and teachers will get those wands that airport security use to search for weapons.  Only in this case the weapons will be iPhones.  But what other changes are we in store for?

One thing I’ve heard a lot lately is that music, books and movies will be created by AI.  And in a sense that will be true.  AI is an accelerant.  It can take an idea that it is given and flesh it out into a big flowery pile of mush that no one would call good.  But that pile of mush probably can be pared and reshaped and cleaned up into something the author could use and do it faster than he could write that much story on his own.  Is that a better way to do it?  No, it’s worse.  But will it happen?  Unfortunately, I think it will.  In fact, from all I’ve read it’s already happening.  Some woman bragged on-line that she used AI to write hundreds of romance/porn novels under dozens of pseudonyms and made over a hundred thousand dollars by doing this.  That’s a pretty bleak reality brewing out there.

And it’s kind of a shame.  It seems to me what AI should be doing is using all this power to assist humans to make a superior product.  I could see a writer wanting an AI to use only a small subset of good fiction to help a writer explore the techniques that great authors have used to draw characters and craft plots that appeal to intelligent readers and entertain them.  That’s a lot better than loading up a trough with slop.

Outside of entertainment and education I think AI will be enormously powerful.  It’s ability to research topics is amazing.  The problem is the lack of transparency about how AI makes mistakes.  Currently, the AI claims to be infallible and does not admit when some “fact” is actually false.  What is going to be needed is a testing procedure to give users of AI a way of finding dangerous errors in the information they’re being given.  That’s the world we will be living in.