Columnists
AI is already taking our jobs and security; can we stop the tsunami?
Wednesday April 19 2023
As the AI revolution bursts around us, the biggest casualty, the fastest, will be reality. FILE PHOTO | SHUTTERSTOCK
One day, in the not-very-distant future, you will see a video of our president speaking, saying something maybe shocking, looking like him, sounding like him, but entirely fake.
It will have been generated by an AI, alongside clips of the UN secretary-general, celebrities, and even your sister-in-law, all saying things they never said.
For, as the AI revolution bursts around us, the biggest casualty, the fastest, will be reality.
For Sony, that fall came early. This week, it unveiled the winning photograph in its highly prestigious global photography competition.
Almost immediately, the photographer rejected the prize and announced it had been a test. The photo had been generated by an AI app.
The test was to see if the judges could distinguish a real photo from a fake one, and they couldn’t.
As the judges now, presumably, huddle, to decide where this leaves their photography competition in the years ahead, they are but the earliest victims.
For our capacity to distinguish real and human from fake and machine-made will be but a memory in too short a time.
Of course, AI is set to destroy the ranks of professional jobs and incomes.
As Middle Eastern news channels now adopt AI news anchors and Chat GPT generates blogs, content creators have been the first to see their jobs disappearing.
But which white-collar jobs will be irreplaceable, in time?
We won’t need accountants, analysts, and most public sector workers — why have a human producing accounts or issuing passports, when AI is better at it and a thousand times faster?
What can a human programme director do, or a marketer, that an AI can’t, know it can hold conversations, analyse, draw conclusions, issue instructions and produce designs, documents, photos and videos?
And if we think, no, our guys won’t go there, how will they compete with the businesses that do?
We are moving into a tsunami. Yet, still, this carnage is the small part. For, already, we cannot trust information that comes to us, except what we see with our own eyes in physical reality.
As the fake content explodes, with all those apps, the role of the media will be dead.
Add to that, almost everything is now Internet-connected. Once we get AI hackers, our only hope will be AI cybersecurity, and we are left with an AI contest driving our global security.
That’s why world leaders are calling for an immediate stop, to work out the impact and ethics, even Elon Musk.
But will we do it in time? We prevented human cloning, but biotechnology took years to get there. AI can already end our reality, jobs, and security, and we have no control over it at all.
