Lately there’s been a temporary lull in horrendously obscene activities from our politicians, and California has not dropped into the ocean…yet. So to fill the gap until our politicians get back on track and natural disasters abound, mainstream media has chosen to report on the profound and scary advances that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been making. The godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton has left Google over concerns and others like Apple cofounder, Steve Wozniak are calling for regulations to protect us from bad actors. And not just the kind on TV soaps.
There is an AI application called, chat gpt developed by a company called Open AI that is extremely advanced and has a ton of data in it. Not all of the data is accurate, seriously. I wonder who it thinks won the 2020 election. Also, the last time I read up on it, the catalog of chat gpt info only includes data through 2021. It’s a time-share system that you can sign up to use at a very reasonable price. It appears that many of our nation’s high school and college kids have been leveraging chat gpt to write their complex, time consuming papers…and they’re passing with flying colors. Some proponents of chat gpt are saying, “Look, kids have been cheating since the dawn of time (so disappointing), this is just one more way that kids will be kids.” Unfortunately with this tool, it’s like a cave man sitting around a ring of rocks, trying to make a fire for the first time. Then someone from the future passes him a saltshaker filled with plutonium and says, “Hey, why don’t you try sprinkling some of this on it.”
Why has AI technology become so powerful of late, Moore’s Law, which states: technology grows twice as powerful every eighteen months, while the price halves. The updated version of Moore’s Law is even more aggressive. To demonstrate how aggressive, in the 1990s the Human Genome Project was initiated to research and identify all of the chemical units that make up the genetic blueprint required to build a human being. When they started, it took ~ thirteen years to crack the first one at a cost of about $2.7 billion. Today, that same result can be achieved in a few days at a cost less than $1,000. Try and wrap your head around that! Taking this learning technology to the next level, with AI a politician or media announcer’s voice can be mimicked accurately (deep fakes) and a convincing likeness can be generated. So could it be that the vast majority of our media and politicians have been replaced by an AI application? It could be that no one really suggested that we forfeit the Social Security benefits that we’ve paid into. AI did it. And no one suggested that I should be entitled to remuneration due to the fact that over 250 years ago, my pasty-faced Irish immigrant ancestors settled in New England and were forced to eat lobster every night as indentured servants. Again, AI. And could it be that Biden and Trump are actually good friend, barbecuing together on weekends, genuinely selfless individuals not caring about the welfare of lobbyists, only looking to help Americans?
Could it be the NoGoodNicks have hoodwinked us all? Something to think about as we ponder regulations that will force our nations’ students to start writing their own papers again.
