Since time immemorial, humans have been the only species that have brought misfortune upon themselves. No other species on earth has done this. Animals look out for their own kind — birds fly in flocks, ants feed in unison. Humans, touted as the smartest, most intellectual creatures on earth, do the opposite. They mock nature, wage wars, and routinely create objects with carefree abandon, only to be controlled by them later.
Think for instance, about the creation of money. If aliens ever came to tour the Earth (although why they would do that is beyond me), they would see money as pieces of colourful, printed paper that hold little to no value. Ask humans and they would tell you they are ready to sell their souls for these scraps. A classic case of the father bowing down before the son.
A similar mishap has occurred in recent times when humans decided to create AI. The smart humans wanted to create something smarter than themselves, but were innocent enough to believe they could get a good night’s rest for a single night afterwards. Imagine creating a monster and keeping it at home as a pet. Smart!
To be fair, however, in the beginning, AI was a dream. Humans gave them cute names like Sophia and other than a few harmless cases of misbehaviour (where Sophia and her kin said that they would potentially kill humans, or something along those lines), they mostly did what they were programmed to do. Techno-savants built on the technology and a team called OpenAI created a chatbot called ChatGPT.
Where Sophia has a human form, its brother-in-tech, ChatGPT does not need a physical presence to sweet-talk you like Romeo. It apparently even passed a university test! And then, it went for the jugular. Google’s chilling announcement to do away with its entire middle management — because bots can do it cheaper, and without lunch breaks — was enough to make writers of the world twist and turn in their beds. They simply could not bring themselves to give their adversary in the computer the open-hearted acceptance that it was due.
The world is still discovering new uses for ChatGPT owing to the novelty of the phenomenon but the creators are not unaware of the future implications of such a technology. The pioneer of Google Bard AI, Geoffrey Hinton, resigned so he could actively warn the world about its dangers, organisations that deal with the ethical aspects of technology were long on their way to creating AI detectors.
People could no longer pass off bot-generated text as their own. Once the initial trauma wore off, writers also realised that the writing style of the bot was largely without soul and that they did not have much to worry about; by then, most academia had already decided to discredit AI generated work completely.
The masters have taken back some control from their AI counterparts but even then, upper storey technological maestros feel the need to push the technology back further. It’s too direct, too unpredictable, too dangerous. Not discounting the human species’ ability to self-destruct, unless the most intellectual beings on Earth decide to give AI emotions and an ability to reproduce, the bots are not writing our eulogies anytime soon. What a relief!
By Munira Fidai
Photo: Collected