The Conundrum of Generative AI

In the camouflage waged between artificial and authentic, there lies a distinctive challenge: can we still distinguish their difference or will they blur the boundaries?

Revolutionary innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) have notably dominated the world, particularly Generative AI, which possesses the ability to learn from data input and generate new content. While it is a testament to the tremendous progress made in the field of AI research and development, their capacity to generate convincing human-like content is quite alarming, making its downsides and ethical considerations come to the forefront. Apart from that, it is appalling to know that even the founder of AI, George Hinton, warned that AI is an imminent existential threat when he quitted with his decade of work at Google.

Undeniably, Generative AI has been proven to be a game-changer in content creation; every individual who has used it has witnessed the enhancement of productivity and the expansion of creative possibilities. It is exemplified by foundation models like GPT-4 that allow users to generate a wide range of academic outputs based on text requests and Stable Diffusion, which allows users to generate photorealistic images and artworks through text input. Their capabilities are not only limited to that because of the emergence of Generative AI variant tools that can also generate music that resonates with human-like creativity, audio through voice-synthesis techniques, seamless replacement of the face of one individual to another, create presentations, and many more.

However, as we marvel at the depths of AI, there are negative aspects and unknown risks that accompany its rapid advancement. In an article in Forbes Magazine, Mike Patton broke down those major risks that George Hinton mentioned, revealing some of their dangers in military applications, misinformation and disinformation, job displacement, and artificial war. With that, it redirects us to the pressing concerns around its unethical inconsideration and the rampant misapplication or manipulation of its uses.

According to Waleed Rikad, Ph.D., in his article published on the website “Medium”, generative AI is enabling fraud and misinformation. This occurs because AI models continue to learn based on the prompts submitted by users, and humans often manipulate prompts by shaping them into their desired and biased outcomes, mostly found in text outputs, and tend to plagiarize artworks. Also, the rise of deepfakes can spread misinformation and deceive the public through their potential to create convincing but fabricated videos. It’s just disheartening that the misuse of AI tools has ignited the prevalence of diminished artistic value, breaches of authenticity of works and reliability of information, inadvertent biases, and discriminatory patterns, just as it threatens the credibility of news, literature, arts, and even personal reactions.

Furthermore, one significant worry is that with the generative AI duly anointed, the path to technological singularity will be inevitable, it is a hypothetical event that was first conceptualized by John von Neumann where AI transcends human intelligence, leading to unpredictable consequences. If we consider Hinton’s claims, they are susceptible to being used in warfare or in situations where AI could potentially replace human labor. This may be a far-fetched scenario but with the remarkable capability of AI to mimic human language and styles and produce highly convincing narratives, images, videos, audio, music, artworks, and many others – the chances are never impossible. It is imperative that we proceed with caution with our usage of AI, the way we abuse its growth will have adversarial consequences in the future.

Generative AI became a camouflage of sorts, seamlessly blending into our artistic and informational creativity, evidently blurring the boundaries between real and artificially generated content. There is an old adage that artificial intelligence always falls short in capturing the essence of humans’ inherent gifts, yet technically, practicing the responsible use of this powerful technology is our way to ensure our future without compromising our values and integrity. Therefore, in this complex interplay, it is crucial that we critically evaluate and navigate the camouflage between artificial and authentic to preserve the distinctiveness and value of human artistry while embracing the benefits of AI-generated content.

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Photo from ibm.com

Author Jade is a student journalist and an aspiring writer hailing from the Philippines. She’s enchanted with rain and stars. And with the penchant of cookies and cream flavoured ice cream, she immerses herself with imagination and in journalism.