Artificial Intelligent is endangering Human Civilization. Part 2
Age of Frankenstein Products.
In the last post (Part 1), we have explored how changes in the digital lifestyle - with smartphones and its applications - had caused a significant changes to the psyche and physical aspect of the human brain and personality. Being too attached to digital information at one's fingertips, has caused a significant drop in the attention span of a person (from previously held 12 seconds to a mere 8 seconds).
What most people do not understand about this drop is that people now had a reduced level of ability to process data in their mind (without any external aid). They had become more thought-less, harder to create complex emotional and intellectual connections (especially with the knowledge that they had obtained) and this could result in a more stressful situation where modern era could demand more from human intellectual properties, only for them to fail to achieve that "range" and rely more and more on things like Artificial Intelligence.
Another thing I had noticed recently (for the past five years or so) is the increase of usage on Artificial Intelligent to create things. I still remember reading about how AI was able to draw things back in 2016-2017 and did not think much of it at that time. Sure, AI can replicate something feed into it (as pictures) and recreate it again as pictures. It could be no different to printing an image we feed into a computer memory or how a 3D printer could work. Matter a fact, we had seen the same principle which had been demonstrated by Sonny (played by Alan Tudyk) in the 2004 Sci-Fi movie, I,Robot which also had Will Smith and Bridget Moynahan in the main roles. At that time, I did not think of it as a great breakthrough as what being described and shown (as the capabilities of an AI) is no different than what already existed in the market (in form of printers and photocopy machines).
But lately, I had been seeing a lot of so-called "advancements" of Artificial Intelligent on the Youtube which makes me worried. Don't get me wrong. I don't assume that they are creating Skynet (like the Terminator franchise) or a Faro robots (from the game Horizon Zero Dawn) here. It could be decades before we could be advance enough to put weapons in the hands of AI-controlled machines (I hope). What worries me here is that the use of AI to create simple things seems to dilute the already existing market of talents in the field of creativity - something which I always believed humans had the monopoly of. Allow me to explain.
Just couple of days before (during the Valentine's Day), I saw a couple in a restaurant. A young man brought and gave a red rose to a young woman whose face light up with a smile for the gesture. This was during the time when I was in deep thought about the topic I was writing now (AI) and how it is affecting the human society. I thought of a scenario. Now imagine the same situation but this time, imagine the man brought a flower, give it to a robot to hand it to the girl (maybe because he is busy with work or something). Could the girl receive the flower from the robot (controlled by the AI, repeating the same words and even in the same voice pattern as the young man) and still have the same reaction? Most of you could probably say Yes because the robot (with the AI) were merely acting as a postman and no one falls in love with a postman. In the outline, I could agree, but this is where the danger we all facing exist and most of us are not aware of it.
The gesture of buying the flowers or delivering it to the young girl is not the important aspect here. Because, like what you could agree, it could be done by a postman (who in this case, is a robot controlled by an AI). However the important aspect is the meaning behind the gesture itself. The emotional connection is lost. Even if the girl receives the flower from a postman, her mind will conclude that it is from the guy and await for him to reappear to cement that connection with physical gesture (like holding hands, smiling, making eye-contact, saying nice words or simply sitting with the person next to you).
It is this physical (and even emotional) connection which will bring the smile onto the girl's face and warmth into the guy's heart. NOT the postman or the robot (controlled by AI) or even the flower itself. It is the connection between two people who are relayed between them through use of medium such as a flower or a postman. Unfortunately, a lot of people today seems to fail to gasp that concept. Matter a fact, many seems to ready to throw away the humanity aspect of such gesture and conduct as unnecessary part in a relationship and rely solely on meaningless things such as flowers, chocolates, gifts and even AI as middle men.
And this is not just in things like Valentine's gift and such. I have seen examples of the over use of Artificial Intelligence as "medium" in businesses and sectors which requires creativity and human touch, but seems to be lacking nowadays or the human factor completely removed from the equation, leaving a blank, soul-less aspect of AI in its place as a replacement.
In a recent (2020) newsletter (Future of Job Reports) by World Economic Forum, it was estimated that AI will replace some 85 million jobs (which are currently held by humans) by 2025 and at the same time, create 97 million new jobs in the same time frame. What the newsletter forgot to mention here is that those 97 million jobs could likely be for new AI and robotic industries with minimum participation of humans, unless the meet the specific criteria required (such as the ability to use computers, provide user interface for the AI/Robots and maybe high-level tasks such as programming).
In Japan for example, starting due to the drop of young population, AI are being used to fulfill roles which was traditional held by humans such as making manga, anime and movies. Giga Manga for example was an approach to this direction and its was held in collaboration between Google, Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and 12 Japanese cultural Institution. Of course I'm not pleased in this development (as many Japanese were not either) as Japanese Manga artists had for decades fought for better recognition, salary and working environment within the Japanese Art Industry (since 1980s) but felt as if the authorities were silent about it, only to turn around and stab these artists in the back with the creation of an abomination like Giga Manga.
Also in term of Music and Movies, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new topic either. In Music Industry for example, Artificial Intelligence and Music (or AIM) for short had been a common subject in many of its Music conference, forums and platforms for decades. The first International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) was held in 1974 in Michigan State University. However, I believe most of the early day conference was regarding the use of computers to generate musics in comparison of humans and actual physical tools which was traditionally available at the time. It was not until 1997 that an AI program named Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) appeared to outperform a human composer at a task of composing a piece of music imitating the style of Bach.
Currently (as of February 2023), we have dozens of AI Music Generators, such as Amper Music, AIVA, Ecrett Music, Soundraw and Boomy among others. Personally I also believe that social medium such as Youtube plays a role in this push for use of AI through its content publishing of free music scores (which you can find easily in Youtube) while having strict copyright rules and regulations for humans to publish anything related to music (or anything else). And since Youtube still has a strong connection to Google, it is very likely that the social media platform is used (by Google) to market their pro-AI agenda into the human market without us knowing about it. That's your Cyberdyne right there, folks (reference to Terminator franchise).
And with the termination of 12,000 jobs (or six percent) of its global workforce as of January 20, 2023, one could wonder - where does all that job went to? I think most of you already have a good idea about that.
Already, Hollywood is making a fuss about using AI in movie-making process which still new into the industry but its effects had already been seen in other (less ethical places) such as Deepfake clips. Deepfakes are synthetic media in which a person in existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. I don't think I need to tell most of you of what had happened to Twitch star, QTCinderalla who found out that someone made a Deepfake porn with her face on it and had broke down crying over the Internet. But more on that on the next post (where I attend to talk about moral and ethical aspects of rising use of AI).
Last and not least, an industry which had associated with Artificial Intelligent (and may even promoted it) for years - Video game Industry. The term AI have never stray far from video game industry as one of the most widely used industries in human civilization. Artificial Intelligent in video games had been used mostly to create interaction between players and the World Environment and its contents - such as NPC dialogs, Day and Night Cycles, Enemy AI, Landscape Generation (commonly known as Procedural Generation) and even combat systems and loot distribution. Matter a fact, I believe that there is no other industries which had a hand in developing AI as much as video game industry had in the past 25 years.
However, today a dark cloud seems to be arising in different form of use of AI in video games. I do not know whether anyone else had notice it as well, but being a video game player for nearly 3 decades (as well as a writer and amateur historian), I have noticed some changes in the industry lately which are troubling.
For starters, most of the larger video game companies had dropped a particular genre from their production line. The genres I'm referring to are the Strategy, Tactical and RPG games which had been largely disappeared from game companies like SQUAREnix and Atlus (which made their profits in early 2000s through these genres). The existing titles like Final Fantasy and Persona had all changed into an action based genre.
The second change I have notice is the increase number of factory-line MMO/MOG type of games or Multiplayer Online Games which may look different only in the style of presentation but the basic concept and play-style are all the similar. And finally changes in the industry which I had noticed is that even the offline games are heavily based on similar style of game-play (mentioned above), player movements, battle systems and AI integrations. It sound and feel like a whole lot of games nowadays are coming out from a factory line instead of behind Minds and Creativity of individual developers and artists.
Take the latest game, Forspoken for example. Even so (as of now) I had not played this game. Watching others play in Youtube actually made we wonder if Forspoken and others (like it) were made using AI through reusing the already existed assets (like Japanese big companies trying to do with Giga Manga while screwing up the human artists).
And as a Unity software user as well as Blender 3D artist myself, I could say that the possibility of that happening is quite high. Games are nothing more than artistic pictures, add with 3D models, animations which can be used on different models as long as they are specific genre types like humanoids, particle systems for effects, reusable scripts usually in form of CSharp or C++ (depending on whether you are using Unity or Unreal) and music/sound effects.Most of these, you can reuse if you already have previous projects like most big companies could have in their personal libraries OR find and use from the Internet or create new contents through the use of AI already mentioned above.
A "factory line" product like these could be easily identified. The game could have a similar game play mechanics, impressive graphical arts, music and sound effects but lacking in everything else which can be considers unique or in what we could call (in artist perspective), lacking in a soul.
In summary, games created by an AI could not have a soul. It could be a repeated recycle nonsense which you can identify easily, could be considered a game which considered did very well in the market (especially through hyped market, drummed up by telemarketers and paid online promoters), could have identifiable features which we can clearly see as a copied and pasted effect into a new game to expect the same "reaction" as the game from which these features was originally taken from. If anything, I think these new AI-made games should be given a new title like Frankenstein Games (since the Frankenstein monster himself was cut and pasted monster from several human parts).
In the next post (Part 3), I could highlight why such attempt (to highlight the use of AI to undermine human factors) is a threat to civilization.
Source :
https://futurism.com/the-byte/anime-manga-fans-ai-generated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_and_artificial_intelligence
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