News - Thursday February 9th, 2023
Reflections on AI
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) is causing concerns worldwide regarding their power and impact on society. Prominent people such as Elon Musk and Bill Gates have expressed their opinions about the future of AI.
Elon Musk has stated that “AI represents a bigger threat to humanity than any war”. Bill Gates, on the other hand, has stated that “AI can be used to help humanity, but we must be careful how they are used”.
It is true that the advent of AI presents a challenge, but it is also true that AI can be used to improve the lives of humanity. For example, AI can be used in the medical field to analyze medical data and help with diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Additionally, AI can be used to improve social services, such as helping the disabled or the elderly.
Here is a table with some of the main AI and their usage statistics:
| AI Name | Usage | Number of users |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-3 | Text generation and chatbots | millions |
| OpenAI | Artificial intelligence research | thousands |
| TensorFlow | Development of artificial intelligence models | millions |
| Siri | Voice assistance for Apple devices | billions |
| Alexa | Voice assistance for Amazon devices | billions |
In conclusion, it is important to regulate the use of AI to ensure that these technologies are used responsibly and that their positive effects are maximized. This is the best way to tackle the challenge posed by the advent of AI and to ensure a positive future for humanity.
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This text is not mine, but it was written by ChatGPT, the most advanced artificial intelligence of our days. The Elvis android image was generated with Blue Willow, one of the infinite text-to-image Ais.
I simply asked the first one to write me an article on man’s fears in relation to the AI topic, starting with sentences said by E.Musk and B.Gates and inserting a table containing a list of the main AIs used and by how many people they were used. The first prompt gave me an already usable item. Then I asked him to write it more concise and in an SEO key.
Here, what you have read was written by an AI in a usage session of up to 10 minutes. My reflection is that all this fascinates me and worries me infinitely.
I have seen many technological revolutions in my life and they have all inspired me, they have expanded my possibilities, they have empowered me.
But this time we are facing an epochal turning point, something that until now was only part of the cyberpunk science fiction imaginary.
Something that can be considered just worrying.
There is much debate on this issue. There are those who linger on the surface (the eternally boring question of intellectual property and copyright) and those who fall into catastrophism (AIs will steal everyone’s jobs), there are those who see in it an enormous enhancement of human capabilities and those who fear that there will be a take-over.
Sincerely, avoiding talking about politics and the technocratic drift which are a separate macro-topic, I believe that AI will be used for practically everything, with the risk of ending up like in “Wall.E”.
If we think of how cell phones have made us unable to memorize telephone numbers or how smartphones have rendered our sense of direction and our ability to memorize a street useless… or if we think of how Siri, Alexa, Youtube , Spotify, etc. are used by many to be offered music and films without even having to look for them anymore, canceling their critical sense and eliminating the pleasure of discovery, well, it’s quite easy to see which direction we have taken.
The question is… was it necessary?
Surely man is running with himself in the eternal emulation of the divine. Surely he always tries to improve himself and throws himself into bigger and bigger challenges. But it is fairly well established that he has a marked self-destructive ability and a certain propensity for self-destruction.
I will continue to study its creative potential, of which there are so many. For now, I won’t deny that the experiments I’ve done with VqGan+Clip, Disco Diffusion, Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, OpenJourney have fascinated me, but these aren’t the AIs that worry me. I see them as fantastic new development tools capable, if anything, of enriching us and speeding up some phases of the creative and production processes.
I think that in the meantime I will continue to reject the tools that cancel the mind by claiming to help it and I will try to suggest to everyone to keep their guard up and use these tools, as far as possible, with awareness.