A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence
I personally have had mixed feelings about AI/ML (machine learning) because like every piece of new technology, there ends up being good and bad actors and/or uses that are for the good versus ones that are used for exploitation.
I only touched on this briefly on my old gaming blog (as it related to gaming). I will reiterate that governments are glacial when it comes to dealing with advancements (politicians themselves being out of touch as well as the politics itself) while corporations, are looking to cash in as much as possible. We are currently at that particular intersection (and much of what is rolling out with generative AI, is also unchecked).
There is a large part of me that is at odds with how generative AI is going about it the “wrong” way in terms of depreciating the actual artistic creation by actual artists (you know, real people). Instead of focusing on reducing the mundane tasks that consume our time (which would allow these artistic types to then focus on creating those pieces, generative AI goes out of its way to do that creation (artwork, graphics, photos, music, etc). The following comes to mind…
The actual human element is being tossed aside in the process and corporate executives will just find ways to utilize the technology to supplant people workers as that cost cutting measure (but will always use corporate speak to sugar coat it like it is all a good thing namely in terms of efficiencies/productivity like they usually tend to do). As someone who was previously in senior management in tech, I’ve seen/had to deal with some c-suite colleagues that had that mindset (which was one of the many reasons I got out of the whole thing).
Screenwriters and voice actors (with the help of their respective unions) have pushed back in the recent past against studios looking to do just that in their industries. But imagine the other industries that do not have employees represented by a union. Note, there was a period a long time ago where I was not a fan of unions (because many were effectively just siphoning union dues from employee paychecks without those union leaders really doing much). Nowadays though (and this was also before generative AI), I feel that corporate executives have gone to great extremes to exploit their rank and file where there needs to be check/balances again.
This short open letter is meant to bring awareness to the other risks that AI poses without checks and balances in place. Whether or not it achieves that or even gets these companies that are pressing forwards with their AI initiatives to agree to those principles, remains to be seen. Looking at how social media companies didn’t really care about how their algorithms were being utilized by bad actors, I’m much less positive that these companies that are heavily pushing AI, will really do anything except to provide nice public facing PR.
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