Big Boys Flaunting Their (Artificial) Toys

The era of the trivialization of AI has arrived.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

The initial premise of using artificial intelligence to improve our lives was great. 

Incorporating AI technology in our cars to give us a GPS navigation system was great. Having access to an online banking system instead of queuing at the bank with cash in our pockets became more secure. Using robots for complex surgeries became life-saving. Digitizing millions of books and having them accessible online? It probably contributed to increasing the global literacy rate from 75% in 1990 to almost 87% in 2020. 

But now the era of the trivialization of AI has arrived. 

After decades of innovations that continue to improve people’s health and quality of life, there is now a surge in AI-based apps intended primarily for fun. From the Instagram filters that changed your eye color or made you look old, acting as a much-desired crystal ball, to the hype du jour: chatGPT and Midjourney. 

These new AI apps were presented as exciting innovations that will change the world.

Or at least the internet world.

Their founders’ egos must have burst with pride when hearing such verdicts about their tools’ anticipated powers. And they surely must have bought larger wallets expecting the financial gains from their artificial toys.  

There is nothing wrong with fun and play. But let’s not confuse fun with life-changing.

 

The obsession with optimization 

ChatGPT, Midjourney and others can produce acceptable content at an impressive speed. When I first tried chatGPT, I was truly in awe. It comes up with entire paragraphs on any given topic, in just a few seconds. The writers here know very well how exhilarating that result would feel. The capacity to fill a blank page in such a short time! The AI robot spits out more words per minute than any human writer ever will. 

And that’s precisely what businesses find attractive about it. AI tools promise to cut the costs for jobs like copywriters, editors or graphic designers. They pledge to make our working hours even more productive. They ultimately aim to make creativity more productive. To me, it’s a scary attempt to reduce our vast, partly mysterious humanity to a set of logical functions a robot can be programmed to execute. In the case of chatGPT, read, rephrase and summarize texts. 

The robot behind chatGPT has “read” about 300 billion (with a B) words. That means approximately 1.5 million novels the size of Moby-Dick. Impressive is an understatement. And because we humans will never be able to read this much in a lifetime, when we ask the tool a question and it can reply with a neatly composed answer, we tend to think it is creative or intelligent. But what it is is a steel warehouse, stocked up with shelves upon shelves of information. And it serves this information to us, humans, who have an infinitely smaller mental warehouse, thus feigning creativity. 

Is this an unsolicited deus ex machina? Are these AI content production tools a solution to a problem we didn’t have? Did we want to fill the internet’s bowels with even more unoriginal, uninteresting — quite possibly, untrue — content? Not new ideas, but merely rephrased content coming from an already existing warehouse of more of the same? I don’t think so. 

The moral question 

It takes a cherry tree four to seven years until it starts to bear fruit. We seem to be a generation that wants the cherries, ripe and juicy, but not the work necessary to grow the tree. We don’t want the years of waiting for it to mature, the hundreds of times it needs watering, the pruning, the not eating cherries for up to seven years. From our love life or fruit availability, to travel times and now AI-induced content, we want it all right now with the least effort possible. 

There is a fundamental moral breach in such tools, which are trained and regularly use copyrighted material. The intellectual and creative work that countless human beings put in over centuries to develop schools of thought, literature, logic systems or visual arts — all this human development work has been effectively robbed and shoved into a technological oven. Then, claimed as innovative and sold to us for a monthly fee. Intellectual property has become a mockery in the face of cash-hungry tech bros. 

AI and the era of post-truth 

When you read 1.5 million large books, I guess you might mix up some of the facts you store in your brain. Even if it’s a robot’s brain. ChatGPT spits out factually incorrect answers regularly, with the certainty of an ignorant human. But if you, the human reader, don’t recognize them as wrong, the newly AI-generated lies become true for posterity.

We have entered the era of post-truth. Do we even care about this, when the way we obtain those falsehoods is through a delightful robot, who even chats politely with you? 

The distortion of truth is not as obvious in a written text as in an AI-generated image. I recently tried one and prompted it with a simple phrase, ‘husband and wife’. When the tool returned the images below, at first you could have a good laugh about it — or advocate for polyandry if that’s how you roll. But such blunders are that much harder to spot in AI-written texts.  

Big boys playing with (artificial) toys

I doubt these AI content creation tools bring real value to our world.

I rather see them as new toys to distract ourselves with. And their creators — part of the tech bros league — seem to me like big boys flaunting the toys they invented. I see four-year-olds proud of the tall Lego robot they built without crashing it. And in general, all four-year-olds think they will save the world with their giant robot. 

The fans of these toys — us all — we are also like teenagers who were handed a kaleidoscope to entertain ourselves with. We spend our days looking into a screen, mesmerized by the magical creations that can be done with the click of a button. They might be factually wrong or unethical but… the gadget is so cool, right?! 

For the past 20 years, we have been inventing games for adults. Not board games to play for a couple of hours in the evening with friends, but the equivalent of heroin-pumped toys. Social media, addictive online games and gamified retail products — they all take over our brains. They numb our critical thinking and steal our capacity to concentrate. Compulsive “games” that keep us inside watching screens or wearing ski VR goggles. Games that help us forget about our meaningless jobs, about our existential dread, about senseless wars and pandemics. 

The web 2.0 (i.e. social media), is drawing its last breaths. But no worries, here’s a bunch of cute new AI robots who politely answer our orders, like obedient servants making us feel powerful and bossy. They will keep us entertained for the next few years. Maybe all the way into the ground.