“I’d had a big surprise when the Australian Writers Guild told me that 17 of my non-fiction books had been plundered by the thieves of Silicon Valley to enhance their AI development.” Resisting AI is personal for columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.
Until recently, I regarded AI as just another technical assist, a natural enhancement of Google where one finds the perfect word to complete a sentence, or to expand on the broad brush of Wikipedia info.
Last month, when I returned to writing fiction after several decades of Australian history, I used its ChatGPT version when seeking the answer to a complex question about a bleeding shark. It was a very scary experience, of which more later.
I’d had a big surprise when the Australian Writers Guild told me that 17 of my non-fiction books had been plundered by the thieves of Silicon Valley to enhance their AI development.
Naturally, I joined the class action for compensation from Meta for illegal use of our copyrights. Last month a San Francisco judge ruled against one aspect of our claim. It was time, I felt, to come to grips with those two seemingly ingenuous initials: AI.
Forests have been sacrificed to arguments over their rights and wrongs, so I went directly to AI itself to see what the fuss was about. “At its core,” said Mr/Ms GPT, “AI simulates aspects of human cognition. Some systems are narrow or ‘weak’, designed to perform specific tasks (like playing chess or identifying photos of cats.) Others are pushing the boundaries towards artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical form of AI that could understand, learn and apply knowledge across a broad array of tasks like a human being.”
Yes, that’s the one I wanted. They were more than happy to oblige. They’re salespersons supreme – eager and deferential. I found myself thanking them for answers and apologising for having to decline their offer to stay and chat!
“The future of AI,” they said (pretending to be impartial), “is simultaneously promising and challenging. On one hand it has the potential to revolutionise industries.
“In healthcare, it can help detect diseases earlier and personalise treatments. In education, it can tailor learning to each student’s pace and style. In business, it can enhance productivity, automate repetitive tasks, and generate insights from big data. It also plays a growing role in climate science, transportation, and space exploration.
“However, with great power comes great responsibility.” (Not only impartial but ethical, too.)
“As AI systems become more capable, concerns around ethics, privacy, bias and job displacement become more pressing. There is a global conversation underway about creating policies and standards to ensure AI development is safe, transparent and beneficial to society.
“Organisations and governments are working on frameworks to align AI with human values… Looking ahead, AI’s trajectory will likely be shaped by how well we navigate these tensions. AI could become one of the most transformative tools humanity has ever created.” (What is the downside? Not a word from Mr/Ms GPT.)
Here’s the really scary part. Look around. If, as suggested, we “align AI with human values” we will destroy humanity and perhaps the globe itself.
We are a species that has normalised war. That has refused to respond to the horrors of climate change. That profits the strong over the weak. The wrecker over the carer. The fable over the fact. The gun over the compromise. The man over the woman. Excess over moderation.
And who is conducting that “global conversation”? Not the Silicon Valley thieves. Not the autocratic governments of Russia, China and Trump’s America. They are inventing and using it to become impossibly rich or to destroy the voices of democracy (or both) where they decide what’s news, who’s taxed and who goes to war with whom.
Frankly, I’d prefer to be in a pool with my fictional bleeding shark.
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