The 2023 seems to become the Year of Ai. Content creating Ai are all over the place. Countless of news report and analysis are out, for me, Ai can be useful, but at the end of the day, this type of tools will do more harm than good.
There are many reports saying that ChatGPT will replace a lot of manpower in workplace, it will create an economic chaos. My focus is not on this point, it’s on Ai, at this moment, will never be able to verify what’s right and wrong.
What I mean right or wrong is not about moral decisions, it involves value judgement, but my point is simpler: Ai cannot determine whether something is existent or not.
I have a friend who works for the government, and she is doing some researches about the legal enforcement of a certain policy in other countries. She uses ChatGPT as the one of the tools. The Ai could return URLs, segments of laws from some places, and they all look very ‘real’, but when she performs a fact check on these created information, they are indeed fake.
We often complain on the content farms polluting the whole internet, but with ChatGPT, the cost of creating an unprecedented pollution would be just a few clicks away.
We can still perform some fact checks today, however, when the whole internet is flooded with information created by ChatGPT, one day we will be having a lot of difficulty in finding what is a fact and what is not.
This Ai will maximize the nastiness of human nature, such as pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. The following situation is likely and will certainly happen, and we can hardly do anything about it.
- Content creators have the desire to attract more views, as more views means more influential, and eventually ends up in more income ($).
- Accuracy is less important than the number of views.
- Viewers and content creators sometimes will be lazy to perform fact check when absorbing information created by Ai.
- Inaccuracy can hardly be corrected, as the task of correcting the contents will involve men (at least at this stage, or even in the foreseeable future). In terms of efficiency, the speed of reversing or correcting will be significantly slower than the speed of inaccurate creation.
- The amount of inaccurate information will eventually surpass accurate information.
- Misinformation is likely to attract more viewers than accurate information.
- When considering the butterfly effect, those sometimes lazy or sometimes inaccurate will accumulate and create a larger and larger impact.
- Soon, the internet will be flooded with junk information (though it is already the case, but ChatGPT will escalate it into another dimension).
- It is not likely to make the right decision with wrong information. (Garbage in, garbage out)
With all the above concerns, we can hardly do anything to stop it. As in the near future, Ai can run on personal computers, which cannot be regulated easily. Some devil governments, institutes, companies, or individuals will be using these tools to manipulate the general public or as information warfare. It is simply impossible to completely regulate those institutes.
What can we do?
Acquire the ability to stay offline.
I found it the essential skills of the generation. In the hyper connected world, being able to disconnect, and disconnect successfully, is itself a luxury and a challenging task.
Have a regular digital sabbath.
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