We are, as I often say, in the stone age of technology. I say that despite the fact that I am surgically attached to my iPhone and spend more time at my computer than anything else, by a very long distance. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that my entire life revolves around technology but in the words of the great bard Randy Bachman, ‘You ain’t seen n-n-n-nothin’ yet’. Even the word ‘bard’ used to be the name for Google’s chatbot Gemini. I am told repeatedly by experts that AI will be a force for good. I am anything but an expert on AI but to date I’ve seen nothing good about it at all.
This is almost certainly down to my ignorance on the subject, but much of what I have seen has appeared on social media where artificial intelligence has been adopted by people who probably don’t have much intelligence of their own, creating fake images of themselves and sometimes sharing AI-created music. To the untrained eye – and few eyes are more untrained than mine – it can be hard to tell the difference between what is real and what is AI.
The use of AI, across all forms of the media, is widespread, from fake music, to AI generated pictures, some so good they look like UHD photographs and even videos. I have seen videos of, for example, President Trump, a man who these days can barely string a coherent sentence together due to his rapidly deteriorating neurological state and there he is, seemingly articulate, speaking with the kind of clarity someone with likely frontotemporal dementia would never be able to do. If he is using AI, the leader of the free world, then it’s a stone cold certainty that plenty of others are, too.
The internet itself has been such a boon to everyone who for whatever reason forgets a name or wants a quick translation of a foreign language. All you do is consult Mr Google or use a simple translation service and use artificial intelligence in order to hide your lack of real intelligence. If you have seen the brilliant movie Still Alice, where Julianne Moore plays Dr. Alice Howland who has early onset Alzheimer’s Disease and desperately tries to cover it up, you will get the idea.
It’s not that AI systems are particularly difficult to use. You could probably teach your dog to operate something like ChatGPT and the results can appear impressive, particularly if you are impressed by something that isn’t real and wasn’t actually created by the person who shares it on social media. In which case why would you use it in the first place? Answer: because you can and, I would add more cynically, it makes you look smarter than you actually are.
As a music obsessive, I am horrified by the use of AI in music creation. The band Velvet Sundown do not exist at all, but this was not revealed until ‘they’ had released two albums and generated over a million hits on the music stealing site Spotify. We have enough issues already with major artists like The Eagles lip-syncing – miming – on their endless farewell tour, as well as Frankie Valli, Britney Spears and – ALLEGEDLY – Roger Waters, Kiss and many, many others. How long before Velvet Sundown are headlining stadium gigs, constructed along the lines of ABBA’s Voyage, with holograms ‘performing’ instead of real singers and musicians? Given the iPhone is not yet 20 years old, you can see where these huge leaps in technology are taking us.
I am constantly being told that I should not be so negative about AI and embrace its benefits and maybe I should. Cleverer people than me – and that’s most people, I’m afraid – say its a potential game-changer and maybe even life-saver in terms of scientific advance and medical procedures. Most of the AI I tend to see is the ‘slop’ variety on social media and platforms like YouTube. But then, I am old and generally prefer things to be like they always were, apart from when it comes to my excessive and some say obsessive use of my own technology. And come to think about it, everything you see on this blog, at least the writing, is not powered by Artificial Intelligence. Some say there’s no intelligence involved at all, though, and maybe that’s a bad thing?
