The Inevitability Of AI

My social media feed is filled with pictures of V (BTS member) with a fan. Comments range from “how lucky!?” to “this is AI”. I peer closely at the picture as if I can discern the difference. I conclude it is not and move on. Also on my feed are screenshots from the Epstein files. Text of a certain font against a white background with portions blacked out and portions highlighted in yellow. I read some, search it up on the DOJ to see if I can find it before concluding it is real. Between the AI slop that has pervaded our digital lives and its use at work, I am yearning for the days when we could look at art, writing, pictures and not worry about it being tainted in some way.

Last week at work, I spent enormous amounts of time documenting changes made over several months. It involved collating material from different sources, abstracting it for a non technical audience and laying it out in an easy to read format. Two days ago, exasperated by the constant popup on Word that exhorted me to use Copilot, I did. To be fair, my workplace aggressively advocates using AI to simplify our tasks. The results were magical. Things I spent weeks on, done in seconds with better formatting. Given a template and source material, my new digital overlord abstracted ideas beautifully, dumbed it down for different audiences and even generated lovely graphics to go with it. I grudgingly gave AI its due.

All morning, I was thinking about the dichotomy in my life. I write stories. I meld lived experiences with fiction conjuring worlds that exist in my head. Yet, in a writers only Zoom, a bunch of us toyed with putting AI to work to generate comps (works comparable to our own) for queries. The allure of outsourcing grunt work is real. The harsh truth is, if fed my manuscript, the LLM will generate a synopsis that is succinct, precise and elegant. I see people in the creative field using it to beautify material they have already generated. I see its use in writing grant applications. I see it leaching into spaces I previously held inviolable.

Today, there was another post I saw on Threads that stopped me in my tracks. A random stranger on my feed wondered why Grok was so good at generating CSAM. No, I am not explaining. Given its overlord’s appearance in the files and the mountains of data he has access to, it makes me wonder what that beast was fed to make it so good.

AI seems inevitable, the way internet was in the 90s. Will regulation and ethics take center stage? If so, how soon can that happen?

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