It has been six months since ChatGPT opened to the public, and our lives, feeds, and timelines have been busy with AI. Tech giants are working relentlessly to innovate toward AI. Microsoft with 365 Co-pilot, Adobe has unveiled Firefly and Sensei, Canva has showcased their Magics, and Meta, previously focused on the Metaverse, the company publicly acknowledged “playing a little bit of catch-up” on AI hardware trends, details of the overhaul.
We are living in a fascinating yet terrifying time. For some people, the rise of AI superpower presents opportunities to be more productive, efficient, and ultimately more profitable. However, there’s been a massive concern that people may lose their jobs to robots that can replace them.
Recently, Dropbox just laid off 16% or 500 Dropboxers. They publicly disclosed that the reason for these layoffs is AI. In their statement, Dropbox intended to recruit individuals with expertise in AI and early-stage product development.
With the help of AI, someone managed to create a children’s book in just a weekend — it’s impressive yet controversial. Ammaar Reshi, a product design manager at Midjourney, published a 12-page picture book, printed it, and started selling it on Amazon.
However, this achievement has stirred discontent among artists, who raise concerns about the ethical implications of AI-generated art, which claim systems like Midjourney are trained using massive datasets of images from the internet, teaching algorithms to recognize patterns and generate new images. Any artist who shares their work online could unknowingly be feeding the algorithm. Many argue that this amounts to a high-tech form of plagiarism that could potentially harm human artists in the future.
One day, while scrolling through Twitter and reading the news, AI almost flooded everything. I silently cried, “Can we please take a break from AI? Just for a while.”
Actually, an open letter endorsed by the Future of Life Foundation calls for a pause in AI experiments lasting at least six months.
Big names like Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Yuval Noah Harari have signed this petition. They say that if such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium. It’s pretty serious. AI systems have advanced to the point where they can now perform general tasks at a level comparable to that of humans. It is crucial that AI labs and tech giants not only engage in a frantic race to create ever more powerful digital minds but also develop a plan to manage this development with appropriate care and resources.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” ~Future of Life
The only AI I have known for years is Jarvis.
Whenever I watched Ironman movies, I always dreamed that someday in the future, I would have Jarvis as my assistant. I think the utopia of AI is when I see Jarvis, who can perform tasks comparable to those of humans, working alongside humans and not doing anything harmful (assuming we don’t include the Age of Ultron).
Jarvis is like a co-pilot to Tony, assisting him in various ways, such as building new tech and fighting villains. The term ‘co-pilot’ is the most fitting representation of AI for me, a concept embraced by Microsoft and Github.
Conversely, we have seen a dystopian version of robots attempting to take over civilization. Fortunately, in the end, Will Smith put a happy ending to it — humans and robots can co-exist.
Would we reach a dystopian version of AI? Probably.
The godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, made a significant decision by leaving his job in AI research at Google and voicing concerns about the imminent dangers.
During his interview with The Times, Hinton echoed concerns about the risk of job displacement and the potential for a world where determining truth becomes increasingly challenging.
Moreover, Hinton emphasized the rapid pace of AI advancement, surpassing his and others’ initial expectations. He has expressed regret regarding his life’s work and often finds solace in believing that someone else would have if he hadn’t pursued it.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have”~Geoffrey Hinton
