Salon.com - Rae Hodge: "Can we untangle our humanity from the artificial intelligence ouroboros?"
Salon.com - Rae Hodge: "Can we untangle our humanity from the artificial intelligence ouroboros?"
Self-devouring, generative AI feeds off of fresh human thought. What happens when the supply dries up?
By RAE HODGE
Every generative AI tool, from ChatGPT to Midjourney, is linked in the same unfortunate way. The Text with Jesus app is inextricably linked to the deepfake nudes generated by supercharged tools from Microsoft and Google — in that they share one foolish premise at core. It's this: The creative ideas and beauty that exist as expressions of our uniquely human experience are capable of existing without the humans who express or experience them, and not only should this beauty and these ideas be treated as commercial products but the act of creation itself should be a product.
Talk about separating the art from the artist. It's rich, then, that the answer to whether any particular version of generative AI is sophisticated enough now depends on whether it can produce something uniquely human, like poetry and art. But the question that is never answered is this: Sophisticated enough for what exactly? Who wants to live in a society that devalues human creative art, the one thing we've been compelled to do (besides mating and murdering) since the dawn of time?
As Spalding University's Lynnell Edwards put it recently: "When did poetry become the new Turing test?"
With all the fumbling haste of AI's emergence, it's easy to laugh and deride companies like Microsoft when outlandish AI-generated tourist guides recommend food banks as a destination. It's harder when entire faux-news propaganda websites appear to be generated out of thin air, and The New York Times mulls its capitulation strategy over OpenAI's alleged copyright infringement.
Who wants to live in a society that devalues human creative art, the one thing we've been compelled to do (besides mating and murdering) since the dawn of time?
The money's no joke either. Some projections expect the global generative AI market will be worth $51.8 billion by 2028. And per Gartner's latest estimates, AI-ready hardware like semiconductors and high-performance graphics processors will reach $53.4 billion this year — an estimate updated from the firm's 2022 projection of $558 million, largely driven by the spread of generative AI.