The chatbot most people have played around with is ChatGPT, created by the Microsoft-backed company OpenAI, which is also responsible for the image generator DALL-E 2. This week, chief executive Sam Altman appeared before the US Senate’s judiciary committee to deliver testimony that sat somewhere between sobering and chilling.
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“My worst fear is that we — the field, the technology, the industry — cause significant harm to the world,” he said, calling for government regulation. “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”
He’s far from alone. Billionaire Elon Musk, an early investor in OpenAI who quit the board in 2018, signed an open letter asking AI developers to pause work on their most advanced products. When even Elon Musk is saying “woah, let’s put the brakes on”, you know things are getting out of hand.
The letter — also signed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and British computer scientist Stuart Russell, who literally wrote the book on AI — asked the key question: just because we can make machines that flood us with fakes, lies and propaganda, automate all our jobs and creativity, and outsmart and replace us, should we? When you put it like that, the answer does seem obvious.
And having the likes of Musk and Altman questioning this stuff makes me feel less of a Luddite for thinking we should shut this down while we’re still Victor Frankenstein fooling around in the lab.
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Let’s not be melodramatic: Photoshop didn’t end the world, and nor did the internet, television or radio before it. There will be myriad positive uses for AI, and it is pretty damn impressive, granted.
But do we really want Photoshop on steroids? Do we really want to have to question the authenticity of everything, from pop songs and poetry to photographs and film? Do we really want to be in a constant state of uncertainty about what’s real and what’s fake?
Perhaps the very notion of authenticity will change, and we’ll come to regard something pumped out by a bot as having equal worth as something crafted by a human. Perhaps the tectonic plates of “reality” will shift, and its dimensions blur, as the premium we put on human ingenuity fades.
Or maybe, like Facebook and BeReal and Google Home and that Houseparty thing from the opening act of COVID-19, generative AI will have its moment in the sun before we collectively say: yeah nah, we can live without that.
I know I can. Join me in the resistance: pop on a vinyl record, close your flip phone and log the hell out.
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