This graph is Nvidia stock performance just today. Nvidia is the company that has become bigger than Microsoft and Google due to their ability to create the chips that developers rely on to run Artificial Intelligence.
So I’ve always wanted to talk about AI but so many changes happen its hard to write about something that is moving so fast. But it’s impossible not to notice the many grumblings. AI requires mountains of data sets and algorithms to identify patterns and arrive at decisions. Just like humans need outside input ie., books, tv, the radio, social media plus our environment (school, family, people around us) to shape our own view of the world, AI needs these in many multiples of zettabytes to learn.
The problem is, companies need permission from us, the creators of this data, to train their AI. And many of us are fighting this because of clear privacy issues. Have you noticed how there are more instances of your phone, computer software or even smart tvs are requiring that you sign up for an account before you can use it? That’s all because every company needs to be allowed access to your geographical location, your search history, your email and messaging history, your viewing habits, your clicks and so on, to train their AI.
There is a group called Artists Against AI I follow. I have started to empathize with their cause because if AI companies are allowed to have their way, they will study human made art in order to make AI generated art. Not only is it taking their creations for its for – profit consumption that is outside of what the art was made for, it is maliciously going to use what it learns to ruin artists’ livelihood as well.
Editors and writers who thought AI was going to make their jobs easier have discovered quite the opposite. Let’s say you were going to write a paper to complete a course, or a draft that will plead / make your case to an officer or sell to a client. Will you simply submit it without checking it first? Of course not. With so much on the line you will need to re-read and double check every sentence and reference, potentially doubling the amount of time if you had just made it yourself. And if the recipient finds out you used AI, usually by using an AI detection tool themselves, you may as well have thrown your career away.
There was a road rage incident recently where the driver published an apology on a popular car fb group. It didn’t take the commenters two seconds to run it on an AI checker to reveal the guy and his apology as a complete fraud.
AI has such a bad rep it desperately needs a good PR company. This is because when anyone says AI it almost automatically means it’s in reference to a fake article, a fake work of art, or something that’s meant to deceive people per se. Also it means people losing jobs. Companies are happy over how it saves them money from spending on a helpdesk crew, but only the CEOs are happy. Everyone below them can only see the loss of a job, and are all wondering when AI will take over theirs.
Recently, the Philippine National Collegiate Athletic Association tried to use AI generated ‘talents’ to replace human talents they had always used since college court side reporters became fashionable. EVERYONE hated it and they had to roll back. I couldn’t understand why they even tried in the first place, because as far as I knew if you told any fan from the participating colleges you were using AI in lieu of the College heartthrob they will hate your guts.
AI is good at making sense of large amounts of historical data to derive assumptions, like weather patterns to forecast storms, climate change and the produce market to determine what farmers should plant and when, monitor a city’s vehicles to prevent traffic before it happens, dig through cancer research to learn what causes it, study criminal activity over time and predict computer virus behavior, but as of now it is not a helpful tool we can rely on. And people are starting to think it’s just another tech stock jargon created to replace the previous cons that were bitcoin and nfts.
Thanks for reading, that’s my tech thoughts for the day. Going back to work now.
