AI panic settles in

Screw you guys, I'm going home!

AI is seemingly becoming one of those topics (like the COVID-19 vaccine or Donald Trump) that can tear families apart. I’m mostly being dramatic, but somehow, it has become a profoundly polarizing topic.

This week, I shared what I believed to be an insightful topic about journalism with my colleagues. Being skeptical smartasses, they soon discovered that AI most likely wrote the post. As usual, the discussion got heated. If something was done with the help of AI, should it be immediately dismissed?

Bamboozled by the fact that there’s no right answer, we started experimenting with an AI detector and soon discovered that some of the more influential pre-AI written works, including the Bible, get marked as written by AI.

Well, if AI wrote the Bible when there was no AI as we know it now, it can only mean that AI is God, right?

(We’re looking into AI detectors at the moment and will report on our findings as soon as we’re done).

And AI is a kind of God in a way. A mundane one, mostly – helping us out with last-minute assignments or a new market approach. Also, one we fear so much that we’re ready to pull a Cartman and simply bail on it.

As I just demonstrated, the discussion around AI is often based on faulty logic. Surely, as with God, we are missing some key facts or concepts that are too complicated for us to grasp.

The discussion and media reporting around AI are still too vague. Too many headlines sounding more like divination from a crystal ball have been pushed online, with anything from an AI apocalypse to humanity’s time running out, an extinction-level threat, almost every job becoming redundant, and many more cliches that have little to do with reality.

We can’t solve any of those fictional problems, and therefore, we, as Cartman from South Park always says, are going home. Shutting down the door to our mind palace because the uncertainty is just too disturbing.

Panic mode often sets in when we operate in the dark. That’s why it’s so refreshing to listen to people like Matt Stone, the co-creator of South Park, who actually sees an opportunity in new tech when some of us only see threats.

Stone joined the Bloomberg stage in LA, humoring people like me by saying there’s no end in sight for South Park. And Sam Altman is the figure Stone would like to mock in the upcoming series.

"Does anything he says make sense or strike you as smart?" he asked Shaw before adding that Altman is a "very smart guy" and he hopes to meet him one day.

Well, smart or not, Altman is behind the life-changing AI model. We should watch it, and him, closely and let him know he’s being watched.

Stone, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be disturbed by AI’s capabilities. It’s quite the opposite, as he seems to be taken aback by the opportunities the new tech presents to creators like himself.

His and Trey Parker’s Deep Voodoo received a fresh round of investments and is set up to speed up processes in Hollywood – actors will be able to transform into any character they want without spending hours in a makeup chair with make-up artists trying to make the prosthetics stick.

If you haven’t done that yet, you should check out the 14-minute-long Sassy Justice parody released by South Park creators just before the pandemic hit. Deepfakes were already scarily convincing. And yet, the humor that Stone and Parker inject into the most serious topics helps us to actually face reality and not hide our heads in the sand.

“We are all blind,” Fred Sassy says at the end. And we kind of are. As different polls and surveys show, we don’t trust AI. And, since so much of the content online has something to do with the new tech, less and less often we go online to find reliable information. We get into conspiracy theories [fueled by tech] that we start questioning everything and everyone until we start hallucinating even more than the AI does.

But, of course, we need to stay vigilant as there’s a lot of deception out there. The Optimus robots at We, Robot event playing rock-paper-scissors? Controlled by humans. Following the controversy, Tesla sought redemption by releasing a video of Optimus navigating by itself.

But we are still pretty much in control. Don’t let go of that control over our lives just because something is hard to understand.