Whenever I go to YouTube or search the internet for information, I am confronted by robots. This frightens me a little.
These are not the traditional robots that we all know and love from our childhood sci-fi fantasies. Instead, these are the robots of AI (artificial intelligence) that suddenly seem to be everywhere, and the thing that makes them so frightening is that many people don’t seem to be aware of how they are manipulated by algorithms and non-human interactions.
I’m especially concerned about AI-produced websites, videos, and images that populate places once dominated by humans and under human control. You Tube videos featuring “English teachers,” for instance, are good examples of this. I’m not sure what kind of software is being used, but it’s quite easy to find videos nowadays that are being produced for English language students or for people studying just about any topic. Have you seen these videos yet? The backgrounds, the people, the voices, the content–all of it is artificial. None of it is real, which causes me to wonder if users are aware of this.
Of course, one could make the argument that the computer I’m using right now is a type of robot and that we’ve been subjected to robot-like relationships for a long time. They would argue that, in fact, the use of word processing technologies such as auto-fill, grammar check, and voice recognition represent techno assistants that we have lived with for quite a long time, and civilization is still intact. Stop worrying.
However, the rules have suddenly changed. Without your knowledge, you are reading, watching, learning, consuming content that was never created by a human mind. It was created by a machine. Shouldn’t that sort of content be labeled as such? “This content was created using AI.” The label would be something like that. Don’t you want to know whether a human being spent time sweating over an article or a video in order for it to serve a purpose intended for other humans?
Most frightening of all may come the day when AI robots create material for other AI robots to consume, leaving human beings completely out of the picture. Are we to sit idly by while avatars and robots do the necessary work that we used to do–such as thinking?
(This is my first blog post on this new blog. I will be experimenting with content here. — Paul)