AI

• artificial intelligence
• inteligencia artificial
• intelligence artificielle
• künstliche Intelligenz
• 人工智能
• tekoälyä
• intelligenza artificiale
• artificiàlo inteligènca
• искусственный интеллект
• कृत्रिम होशियारी
• inteligência artificial

This is a list of the two words "artificial intelligence" in a bunch of different languages, courtesy of google translate. They are the two words that have likely become more and more relevant in recent years.

For many, they are the dreaded two words that threaten to upend their entire careers. For some, they are the two words on which they have hinged entire careers. For others, it's just another tech fad that will lose its hype eventually. To me, it doesn't seem certain where any of this artificial intelligence stuff will go. I'm certainly not embedded in the AI industry, so my outlook is a far cry from an expert's opinion. But I can give my thoughts as a person interested in technology and the human condition.

My ideology when it comes to robots in general is that they should help humans, not replace them. Robots are great for performing automated tasks that need to be repeated over and over again. Humans hate doing things like that, and they are often prone to mistakes when they become bored of it. Robots alleviate humans of a burden on their time so that their efforts can be spent on other more important tasks.

This is something that artificial intelligence can do well. Generative text algorithms, the ones that are in the news all the time like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc., are incredible at analyzing large data sets and finding patterns. This is because all that they do is predict what the next word is going to be. These generative algorithms rely entirely on text to do their work; they take text and refactor it to satisfy whatever prompt they take as input. These algorithms can't make anything new, so they don't necessarily have any real intelligence.

That's where it ends. The paragraph above has a lot of implications for many industries, since those industries are built upon analyzing massive datasets (meteorology, automotive, medicine, etc.). Generative algorithms can take those datasets and perform the work necessary in a fraction of the time it would take teams of humans to do so. What these algorithms can do is actually incredibly limited in terms of scope, because it's all just text-based.

The movie Terminator (which came out in 1984 by the way, coincidence?) warned us about how AI was going to take over the Earth and kill all humans. They came in the form indestructible metallic humanoids with laser guns. That's usually what people think of when someone mentions how AI is going to take over everything. What nobody seems to have expected is that AI would come for what makes us human at our core: art. AI doesn't have the potential to kill us all physically, but culturally, it has the potential to end everything.

These generative algorithms are getting better at creating images based off of art created by real, hardworking humans. There are people trying to find ways to generate media to replace the work that real artists perform. This is the evil side of generative AI. There is no point to create "artwork" with AI because it lacks soul and expression. The point of art is to express the viewpoint of the creator. It is not a task that can be automated, because humans don't get bored of it. There are no mistakes in art, there is only expression. AI is artificial - it is a work of art itself. Can art propagate itself to create more art?

I don't think art should be able to create itself. Essays should not write themselves, paintings should not be prompted, videogames should not be a blend of other videogames. This is all work meant to be an expression of the souls of the people who make them. Automating that process only leads to the dystopia depicted in the movie Wall-E where all the humans are obese, live in a starship, move around in floating chairs, and have augmented reality content floating in front of their faces all of the time. In that scenario, it's easy to imagine that the content is generated by robots, just like how all of the robots do everything else important in that movie. The robots even learn to love better than the humans.

Robots are not coming to kill you. They are coming to take your freedom of expression - a death that threatens to end what makes us all human.