(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
There is no escaping artificial intelligence. No matter how clever we think we are, our lives are going to be affected. We can only hope that it is in a good way, but many of us have grown accustomed to the threat of AI being there to take over our jobs.
It is quite possible that AI could do the job of designing and laying out the pages of the newspaper. ChatGPT could find the right combination of words and matching images for the front page — and do it all without cursing and complaining while actually making the deadline on Thursday afternoon.
The same goes for producing a weekly column. It just needs the right prompting: “Write a column in the style of Christian Stephen but make it less grumpy and leave out the dad jokes.”
So AI joins the long queue of threats to jobs in the media. And the situation is the same for anything involving creativity. Writing, music, art, architecture — it is all ripe for the artificial treatment. A Damien Hirst spot painting? Too easy. One of those two-minute punk bangers by The Ramones? Be serious!
These are just frivolous examples, because the limitless resources of the AI “machine” mean the real problem for us mere mortals is how to tell the difference between artificial intelligence and genuine stupidity.
This is particularly alarming for education. Students have naturally wholeheartedly embraced AI, because it makes researching and writing their assignments so much easier. ChatGPT is there to do the work.
So artificial intelligence methods have had to be found for the teachers and lecturers to identify who has been using AI. The various institutions have had to develop policies and procedures to deal with this very modern method of “cheating”.
And just when they think that all the proper measures are in place, along comes a new twist. There are now AI tools designed to humanise artificial intelligence. The assignment written by AI can be filtered to make it seem more “human”.
Not sure whether AI recognises the irony here but the students have to be careful not to put their assignment through the “humanising” tool too many times. It might just end up being the rambling, badly researched offering they could have achieved without any artificial assistance.
It would be helpful if artificial intelligence could tell us whether there are going to be any jobs that are safe from the AI invasion. Or are we all going to end up on the couch idly flipping through the AI-generated offerings on Netflix? Maybe there will be a new season of The Sopranos and we discover what really happened to Tony.
But, wait, our disgruntled abuse of the TV remote suddenly brings us to the sports channel. And here is football in all its messy human extremes: outrageous skill, stupid mistakes, boorish fans. Even AI can’t replicate Lionel Messi. The only sign of artificial intelligence here is the irritating VAR system.
The biggest problem with AI is that it is such an all-encompassing concept but it is not tangible. Where is it? What is it made of?
There are some, who obviously haven’t embraced AI, who say “it is all in the cloud”, often while gazing heavenwards. I have been reliably informed that this is not where the cloud is.
Artificial intelligence lives in the giant servers kept in well-guarded, fortified facilities. This vast repository of information is controlled by those disproportionately small “chips” that the United States refused to sell to China.
This simplistic notion of AI still leaves me with the desire to “humanise” AI.
And this is where that very old-fashioned idea of a robot comes in. Predictably it is the Chinese who have updated this concept with a troupe of humanoid robots performing a dance at a festival.
Sport isn’t immune either with humanoids taking on humans in a half-marathon.
Imagine how inspiring it would be for weary Joburg residents to see an AI-driven robot-repairing robot striding through the city streets fixing the dead robots. Our battered traffic lights would be made theft proof, damage proof and load-shedding proof. Never again would we have to put our lives in the hands of those self-appointed traffic controllers at the busiest intersections whose only claim to authority is a dirty reflective vest worn over their ragged clothes.
The robot-fixing robots would probably be so intelligent that they would have plenty of time for a side hustle of filling in the potholes.
Brushing aside the question of what the robots do when that little box next to the line “I am not a robot” comes up online, the most important question for the AI robots to deal with is, of course, what is to be done with all the redundant humans.
Once this little issue is solved they could turn to the more difficult problem of ensuring that there is a functioning democracy — but without the pesky politicians.