On the Terrifying Speed of AI
Should We Be Afraid?
(Quick sidebar: if you have no idea what I’m talking about when I talk about “generative AI”, you can read a brief explainer here.)
AI is here to stay, or so it seems. It’s everywhere in the news—at least in the tech world—and seems to be invading every corner of our lives. I’m not opposed to it, nor do I think it’s all that good. But the speed at which it is advancing (in terms of both development, and infiltration into the common spaces of our lives) is concerning.
So what do we do about it?
It’s Not All Bad
Now I know what you might be thinking: Bob you’re a pastor. What could you possibly know about AI? Fair point. But hear me out.
Artificial intelligence shows a lot of promise for automating complex problems, such as classification tasks or error detection. For example, I use R (a statistical programming language) for some side projects I’ve been working on. Sometimes I’m too tired to debug a script, so I’ll dump it in ChatGPT and ask, “what’s wrong with this?” and it will do a fair job at analyzing and providing a solution. I wouldn’t use it as a primary source for writing scripts, as it can’t get into my head, but it’s pretty good at programming-related tasks.
It also shows promise for classification tasks. I see great value in, say, medical research, as researchers look for more and more accurate ways to identify cancers and develop complex solutions. Sometimes what you really need is a lot of directed computing power—and AI can help with that.
Where it gets fascinating (and weird) is in the open-ended generative use cases. Pop over to ChatGPT and tell it to write you a story about a flying pig who became president of his local home owner’s association and it’ll do it. It’ll probably do a pretty good job of it. Then ask DALL-E to generate an image of that same pig, and it will most likely provide you with a decent image. Actually, here you go:
I hope that image doesn’t haunt your dreams. But this is the fun/funny side of AI. After all, isn’t that what imagination is all about?
The Darker Side
There is, of course, a darker side. There’s always a darker side to technology. It’s not hard to imagine the potential problems that generative AI might cause.
For example, last night I showed my family a new feature in Google’s “NotebookLM”. Google Notebook is a “personalized AI collaborator” that allows you to upload sources that it reads, becoming “an instant expert in those sources so you can read, take notes, and collaborate with it to refine and organize your ideas.” Unsurprising stuff so far—particularly after seeing what one can do with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
But get this: you can have it summarize your notes for you, as though two people were having a conversation about it. A customized podcast about your content. For kicks, I fed it Genesis 1:1-2:3 (ESV). Here’s a portion of what it gave me back:
Are you nervous yet? Now, like all AI, it’s not perfect, and there are all kinds of tell-tale artifacts.1 However, this is a huge leap from what, say Siri or Alexa can do. And as one of my teens articulated, it’s scary how fast this has developed. Even he feels like he’s struggling to keep up with the pace.
While there’s certainly benefit to all this computational magic, what I also see are the hundreds of ways children, teens and college students will use AI to bypass the hard work of learning and developing ever-so-important critical thinking skills. I see all the ways corporations will seek to replace human creatives with generic AI content farms. And of course there are the human exploiters (scammers, pornographers, etc.)
What Shall We Do With the Machines?
Brian Merchant has a fascinating book on the Luddite movement. It’s a historical overview that makes connections to contemporary society. What I did not know before reading this book was that the Luddites were not really anti-technology; they were a resistance movement to invasive technologies. The industrial revolution brought about great changes—many that contributed to human flourishing. But in the case of the Luddites, it was devastating. An entire generation of craftsmen were effectively wiped out as they were replaced by the machines.
Technology in the modern world tends to move in spurts. There’s some innovation, it spreads quickly, disrupts the status quo, and then stabilizes. Think of the power loom that threatened the spinners and weavers; think of the invention of electricity; the innovation of rail travel; the introduction of the automobile; human flight; the telegraph; the telephone; nuclear power (and bombs); the internet; and on and on it goes.
With each major innovation, the status quo was disrupted, but then society adjusted to the new normal. Good typically came from the change; but plenty of evil as well.
In that sense, there’s nothing new under the sun. I suspect we are in the midst of yet another technological spike, and we’ll figure out what to do with this AI thing before too long. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to be careful. We do. In fact, as Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation so forcefully argues, we never really anticipated the damage smartphones would do to young people. We still have a long way to go in figuring out how to use these technologies well—and determine if they actually serve us or just hinder us.
So it is with AI. Don’t panic. But also, don’t trust it any further than you can toss it.
The most famous tells of AI generated photography is that it doesn’t seem to know what to do with human fingers. Always count the fingers!
“Always count the fingers!” Ha!