BY MARK GARAY
“See the men paint their faces and cry
(Like some girls) Like some girl, it makes you wonder why
City life, sure it’s cool, but it cuts like a knife, it's your life
So, forget all that you see
It's not reality, it's just a fantasy”
- Aldo Nova “Fantasy
Scarlett Johansson is pissed! So are Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cate Blanchett, and 700 of their friends. All are actively calling for a leash on Artificial Intelligence. They don’t like how the new technology is replicating their images to sell stuff. And they really don’t like how their image rights are being sold downstream.
For their part, bigger platforms are taking notice. YouTube, for example, is requiring content creators to notify ahead of time of their use of AI. YouTube has also chosen to flag AI videos and explore software that can detect unauthorized use of the technology.
I have no idea why it has landed this way, but I find myself turning to YouTube more and more as an aspirational entertainment destination. When I was a kid, there were three main television networks to choose from. And if you were lucky, some obscure independent TV station that only defuzzed when the wind was blowing just right.
And so, it astonishes me, the number of options available to airwave originalists in this decade of digital decadence. The sheer tonnage of choices online has made anything offline a below-market risk. Yes, the world seems to be changing faster than a kid just home from church. Take a guy named Roberto Lopes Jr., a self-described “designer, architect, creative director and professor of creativity and AI”.
His work on @roblop_experience caught my eye because it married AI (which I know nothing about) to The Beatles (with whom I’m familiar).
If you are over 40 and have only a limited, if not casual, relationship to new technologies, you might be as clueless as I am about AI. Then again, I used to think Tiramisu was a Puerto Rican folk dance when I first heard the term. In fact, I was so sure that other people were as clueless as me about AI that I initiated my own private survey. So, I set up shop outside a local Kroger store and asked out loud. “What IS AI?”
“It’s a computer thing that creates stories and other things”, 67-year-old William told me. “It’s like a search engine.”
“Oh man! That’s technology that can mess people up,” said Lewis, a 28-year-old delivery man said.
“It’s something used to spread lies about people like Trump,” 38- year-old Linda feared.
“Is there anything good about it?”, I asked. “Probably not”.
Even my own 29-year-old son envisions an eventual machine revolt spurred by technology, like in The Terminator. Then again, I once had to explain the difference between butter and margarine to him at an age when I would’ve thought it was obvious.
Dictionary.com defines artificial Intelligence thusly: “the capacity of a computer, robot, programmed device, or software application to perform operations and tasks analogous to learning and decision-making in humans, such as speech recognition or question answering.” What that definition does NOT include is the human fear element. And, per usual, I can’t help but wonder how much fear has contributed to impression.
A man named Geoffrey Hinton is considered the “godfather of AI.” Hinton has regretted his life’s work because of how he says AI could become smarter than us. A couple of years ago, he quit Google to focus full time on warning the world. And as I think we’ve already seen, many others share his fears. A lack of transparency on how AI makes its conclusions and how it uses whatever input to create bias is kept under strict proprietary lock and key. Predictions are that robots will replace workers. And there’s the perceived threat to widespread privacy and technology. For example, China’s facial recognition could gather enough data to monitor peoples’ relationships and political views.
I don’t want to sound snarky, but I saw a whole new generation born upon the art world when I saw the works of Roberto Lopes Jr. the other day.
So, it comes to this for me. AI is a strange new cuisine with an untested flavor and an undefinable consistency. It is full of both bad calories and good. The results of its nourishment may make some people healthier and others sick. I’m not sure it’s a taste that will sweep the world away or take our lives to new heights. But for now, this dish is energizing us in unexpected and unexplainable ways. It’s gonna take a while to see how it affects our aggregate digestion. Meantime, consume at your own risk.
(Former ABC13 Houston KTRK anchor Mark Garay returns to mikemcguff.com as a guest blogger!)
