Bob Bell: Keep Your AI Hands Orf My Jeeps!
My dear friend Martin Hesp wrote me a few days ago full of enthusiasm at the potential of AI, while dutifully noting the potential drawbacks too. Loss of jobs, for instance.
Like most people, I can see both points of view, but my general sense of it is one of dread. Okay, I admit I am a bit of a Luddite. I still listen to music on 78 rpm records, made of shellac, and I trundle around my hometown in a 76-year-old jeep. But I keep up on the news via my computer, enjoy the benefits of owning a cellphone, and am amazed and happy with the technology that enables me to wear tiny hearing aids that have the ability, should one of them fall out while gardening, to be tracked and located among the weeds by my cell-phone. Yes, really!
I find GPS an extremely useful tool, and while I love books, do find Google a useful method of researching subjects, most especially when I’m out and about, in the grocery store for instance. So yes, a bit of a Luddite, but not a rabid one.
But the AI thing is something else. I haven’t tried to use it and so am quite unaware of just how much it might help me personally in daily tasks. And a lot is probably the answer. I do understand that.
But there is still a but.
I guess this has been percolating in my mind since ChatGPT first hit the news a few weeks ago, but Martin has crystallized the issue for me.
I recently sent him a bit about jeeps, and only attached one picture, a rather boring stock outline of a 1940s WW2 jeep taken from a manual. Martin, being the visual and forward-looking fellow that he is, wanted the post to be a bit livelier, and so had his AI slave draw a ‘Jeep’ to flesh out the piece pictorially.
All well and good, I suppose, for the ordinary punter. The thing is, jeep guys are not ordinary punters. They are like stamp collectors who examine watermarks, art historians who examine brush strokes, orchestra leaders who listen for wrong notes. Martin’s slave drew a nice enough picture, but there was something wrong with it. It was like a camel with three humps, a giraffe with two necks, a twelve-bar blues with three extra bars. A pub with no beer. It just wasn’t right … it had elements of the jeep to be sure, but it was a Frankenstein of a jeep.
Looking at it is a bit like imagining Pavarotti singing a Little Richard tune … the imagination goes rather awry.
It all makes me think we are beginning to enter a world of the facsimile, the fakesimile with the accent on ‘fake’. And if the fake is good enough, how do we know it is fake? Jeep guys will know that Martin’s jeep illustration is fake, but most folks won’t.
The ramifications for the misuse of AI, for propaganda purposes, are staggering. We already live in a world where for many people black is white and white is black. The growth of social media has, over the last twenty-five years, resulted in the viral distribution of falsehoods, fantastic conspiracy theories and wishful thinking. AI will be able to magnify this by an unimaginable power.
Authoritarian states like Russia and China already have vice-like grips on their media … AI will cement the lies with a thick layer of unbreakable epoxy.
The merry-go-round is gathering speed and all perspective is a blur. And this is simply the awful political aspect.
The poetical and artistic are others, and there will lie the true test for AI. Will it be able to learn poesy? Convey unbridled joy? Pull the emotions with the perfect phrase or brush stroke or note?
And if it tries, will it matter if we know? Will it matter if we are duped? When we get a letter from a friend, will it really be from that person? Will it really convey their thoughts, their sentiments? And if not, what is the communication worth? What is the friendship worth? What is true? What is false? And how in the hell will we know anyway? It is only right that we recognize that recorded music has been going this way since the advent of magnetic tape. The ability to overdub, to piece together disparate tracks, to ‘tune’ a voice or instrument electronically and so on, to the extent that most music that is heard today is a confection, an assemblage of bits and pieces artfully put together to please the ear. Productions rather than performances. Now AI will be in charge of this process …
I am attaching with this little piece a few photos of jeeps. Most are old and battered, junkyard dogs if you like. To the jeep aficionado, they are visual poems, they emote through the rust and dilapidation, they talk of a past, a present and a future. The past, a time of being mechanically and cosmetically entire and functional, a present, being the subject of the vicissitudes of time and decay, and a future, a future borne of the dreams of the beholder, a future of being functional again, a future of being rescued and lovingly made whole again …. This is the poetry of old jeeps.
And the question is, can, and will, AI envision it?
And if so, what of us?
