Actually, Sometimes AI Can Jump in a Lake
August 30, 2023 | Authentic Creativity, Ethical AI, Future of healthcare, Healthcare Marketing, Technology Vs Humanity, healthcare comms, med comms
In his latest blog, Tim considers how some early adopters of AI are delegating the responsibilities and roles that make us human.
Warning: There will be no twist-reveal that the first three paragraphs of this post were written by AI. This will be very clear by the end of the third paragraph.
So. You can spend sixty-eight seconds watching this, or you can trust me when I say it’s a TikTokker very excited about how TextFX, Google’s new AI-powered writing tool, can generate content for them to pass off as their own. An example: “rain is a great way to wash a car for free!”
I’m sharing this link because it was a tipping point for me. It shifted me from: “pretending to be unreservedly excited about AI because I run a marketing agency” to: “OK, hold on a data-scraping minute here.”
Because it’s not a big leap from the future that TikTokker is imagining, to a world where we’re not only glued to our devices, but eagerly devouring car-washing advice… from our devices. No human involved, apart from whichever person thought to write it down and leave it somewhere for TextFX to scrape and monetise.
Doesn’t that make you just a bit sad? The possibility that we’re programming ourselves out of having ideas?
Until now the responsibility for being wise, funny, caring, to each other… has been ours. Now we’re on the verge of delegating it to Large Language Models that don’t know what cars are, let alone care why we’d want to wash them. “Excellent,” says apparently-everyone, “now we don’t have to think up our own content we’ve got more time to spend watching deep-faked kittens fall off CGI windowsills.”
Or to approach it less flippantly, how many people every day are already getting AI to write letters of condolence to bereaved friends because putting sympathies into words isn’t easy or quick?
It’s not none, is it?
Full disclosure; I’m being a hypocrite. Just today I used AI to translate a German video for my work. Two days ago, and many times before, AI found me a restaurant perfect for a client lunch because choosing venues isn’t easy or quick. I also accept, as a copy specialist – and someone trying to finish off writing a novel before AI finishes off novelists – that I am biased by that oldest human habit of territorial defence.
But I don’t want to cram TextFX back in the bottle because I like writing. It’s because I like being inspired, amused or moved by the warm, slimy, completely miraculous brains of real people; not by a cloud processor in a cooled warehouse outside Carson City. I feel, without exaggeration, existential dread when imagining a life where the jokes I’m told, the songs I hear, or the cheapskate carwashing advice I receive haven’t come from a similarly flawed but completely authentic intelligence.
And I can only assume I’m not alone in my anxiety, because pilots are still a thing.
We haven’t needed pilots in our planes since the 90s, when Autopilot software added take-offs and landings to its capabilities. But we have at least two human pilots on every commercial flight. Why? Because nobody wants to board a plane flown by code alone, even if the code’s better than the meat-sack on nearly every level, from calculations-per-second to not having food allergies.
In our deepest recesses, we trust ourselves more than our technologies. We take comfort in the actual. The billions of dollars Jeff Bezos threw into the Kindle didn’t kill the book. We still go to art galleries, for the half-millimetres of depth in those brushstrokes that Midjourney will never give us (at least until the bastard teams up with a rogue 3D printer).
So the optimist in me holds out that maybe we’re a little caught up in this moment, barrelling over ourselves to champion what AI makes possible, and not thinking enough about what we actually need it for.
When AI is expanding our reach, it’s thrilling. Here it is literally giving a voice to a paralysed woman. One day AI might unlock nuclear fusion and save us (which I genuinely consider more likely than it unlocking nuclear silos and destroying us). I’ll be cheering for AI when these days come along.
But when it’s doing things we enjoy for ourselves, things that make us human, do we need to hand over the keys wholesale? And, crucially, will we want to? The writers and actors striking right now in Hollywood are scratching that exact itch. Perhaps, and perhaps soon, more of us will start defining and defending the territories where we’d rather keep our intelligence real.
Tim Gomersall is the Managing Director of the Good Ideas Group
(Until the marketing community ostracises him for this post)
P.S. As someone without off-street parking, I can vouch that leaving a car out in the rain is the best possible way to make it dirtier.
This content was provided by The Good Ideas Group