If you had thought about it at all, you may likely have hoped that artificial intelligence’s spread of popularity this last year would halt its “viral” spread short of politics. In a June 25 New York Times article, Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers dash your hopes.
Regular readers of this column are familiar with one use of AI: images constructed to arrest your attention and ease you into an old-fashioned presentation of news and opinion, written without benefit of AI.
But our images are obviously fictional, fanciful — caricatures.
One advantage of AI-made images is that they are not copyrighted. Using them reduces expenses, and they look pretty good — though sometimes they are a bit “off,” as in the case of a Toronto mayoral candidate’s use of “a synthetic portrait of a seated woman with two arms crossed and a third arm touching her chin.”
But don’t dismiss it because it’s Canada. Examples in the article include New Zealand and Chicago and . . . the Republican National Committee, the DeSantis campaign, and the Democratic Party.
Indeed, the Democrats produced fund-raising efforts “drafted by artificial intelligence in the spring — and found that they were often more effective at encouraging engagement and donations than copy written entirely by humans.”
Yet, here we are not dealing with fakery except maybe in some philosophical sense. Think of it as the true miracle of artificial intelligence, where heuristics grab the “wisdom of crowds” and apply it almost instantaneously to specific rhetorical requirements. Astounding.
There’s a lot of talk about regulating and even prohibiting AI — in as well as out of politics. After all, science fictional scenarios featuring AI becoming sentient and attacking the human race precede The Terminator franchise by decades.
I see no way of putting the genie back in the bottle.
The AI will only get better, and if outlawed will go underground. It would be a lot like gun control, only outlaws would have AI.
We cannot leave deep fakery to the Deep State.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
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3 replies on “A Simulacrum of Solace”
AI is not the problem.
AI uses symbols mindlessly but according to rules discovered to get the results that the AI is programmed to seek. In this regard, AI uses symbols exactly as does a pure psychopath. But our political class is already mostly characterized by psychopathic and sociopathic behavior.
Jesse Jackson’s speech to the 1988 Democratic Convention was at times a word salad, yet has been much praised. Before that, we might look to those speeches of Adolf Hitler that were at times gibberish (vocalization salads, as it were). These cases are somewhat extreme, but lesser nonsense is found in almost all the speechifying and punditry that dominates our discourse. Very simply, it works if the objective is to herd large shares of the populace.
Essential to a real defense is critical thinking, which analyzes apparent propositions and systems of propositions for coherence and for how involved must be the assumptions need to bring these systems into conformance with observation.
The formal educational system (schools) and an informal educational system (journalism and topical entertainment) do not condition people to be bona fide critical thinkers.
And, if anything comes of fulmination about the use of AI in political discourse, it will not be a wide-spread commitment to inculcation of critical thinking, but instead will be measures to ensure that the populace is herded in particular directions and by particular means.
Excellent take on AI, Paul. Excellent.
The lead images you have used lately are revolting.