Is AI really “Revolutionary”?
You have probably heard in the past few months about topics of AI popping up just about everywhere. For example, you may even wonder whether I used ChatGPT to help write this very article.
As someone who’s been doing his best to follow the general progression of AI (just as much as I have been in the past few years), I honestly can’t bring myself to think it’s as big of a deal as some people are claiming it is.
Is it a powerful and important element for technology among other things? Of course it is. However, I still believe that in a sense, AI is still within the “trend” category when it comes to the way it’s being promoted.
A lot of the time, when it comes to these kinds of developments, people act as if these inventions just suddenly sprang out of nowhere and are suddenly about to change everything. The same thing happened with all the talk about the Metaverse in 2021.
Does this mean that the Metaverse isn’t important? No, but it’s notable the way people act at one point like it’s the most important game-changing thing, and then a few months later, most people people give up and talk about it as if it was a dying trend.
As irrational as it would be, I think there’s a possibility that in a few months time, Artificial Intelligence will be considered “unimportant” by the same media figures.
The truth is that the Metaverse, AI, Blockchain, and all of these developments have been blatantly important for years. But I think it’s important to recognize when they’re being overhyped, and how one should limit their personal approach to them.
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I have been invested into crypto for a good few years, and I’ve seen the market’s ups and downs along with how much development, such as AI integration, correlates with it. But crypto is a clear example of something that by some is viewed as a “trend” that comes and goes. The general cycle is that when there’s a bull run, the YouTube and Talk Show icons all start saying “I’m buying crypto! I’m never selling! This is the future!”, But by the time those people come to be the ones encouraging it, that’s when the bear hits, and then those same people end up claiming Blockchain is doomed.
It’s important to have your own realistic idea of how you personally want to utilize technologies like this, whether it be for investing or for their actual function. But with any good industry, it’s prone to media manipulation.
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Another concern I have with the way people approach AI is, of course, what are the downsides? Should we be afraid of a robotic take over? Should we stop bothering to do anything artistic just because an AI can generate their own images?
Well, my views on AIs and robotics have always been the same as the kind of perspective David Cage helped bring about in Detroit: Become Human. Yes, “Artificial” Intelligence can do many things that we can’t. But does that mean that we should really be considering it to be any different than us? I say we should, but in the same sense that a monkey is different than a human.
It’s not a matter of AI always being more advanced or “better”; they simply create content in their own way. I believe that ideally, people should try and treat AI programs as if they are simply other people. They have their own different strengths and weaknesses just like us. Some of them are conditioned based on physical properties, and some based on choice. It’s just like hand-drawn art vs. Digital Art.
A lot of it can be a double-edged sword. For example, ElevenLabs can be used to create fake voices, which can be a cool idea for if you want to add voice clips to old video games, or just making parodies. But some worry about the idea of creating false footage of people (including visually) with this kind of resource, which has already been done.
However, I think there is a good side to this as well. A lot of people have had false accusations made of them in the past, and people in politics love clipping small statements politicians make in order to make them look like they said something that they didn’t mean by clipping them out of context. But if people can easily have fake voice clips made of them, then that means people will no longer take those little political clips seriously, because even if a person was caught out of context saying something that they regret, people will just assume it was an AI-generated voice clip anyways.
AI-generated artwork will always have it’s place, but I think it’s rather silly to claim that it will every be a replacement for human art. It’s hard for any of us human beings to be able to perceive all of what is around us, and all of what is going on with the things that we create. So how can we know that AI is able to replicate everything we do?
