AI Is Coming for the Creative Class

Soon, we won’t be able to tell the difference between communicating with people and computers. We won’t know the difference between a conversation with a human and a bot. If you’ve had a helpful chat online with a retailer or your bank, for instance, you’ve likely already discovered this. The merging of biological and computer-based intelligence is called the Singularity. In technology, the Singularity describes a hypothetical future where technology growth is out of control and irreversible.

These intelligent and powerful technologies will radically and unpredictably transform our reality. This is the future that many experts in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics are striving for. They believe that once we create machines as intelligent as humans, there will be no limit to what those machines can do. They will be able to improve upon themselves, and eventually, they will surpass human intelligence. This is the point at which the Singularity will occur. When the Singularity occurs, the world as we know it will change irreversibly. Machines will become smarter than humans, and they will have the ability to improve upon themselves. This could lead to a future where machines are in control and humans are relegated to a secondary role. Alternatively, it could lead to a future where humans and machines merge, and we become cyborgs with superhuman abilities. Many experts believe that the Singularity is inevitable and that we need to start preparing for it now. They believe we must create ethical and legal frameworks to ensure the future is as positive as possible. Others are more skeptical and believe that the Singularity is a long way off or even that it will never happen. What do you think? Is the Singularity inevitable? What kind of future do you want to see?

?Newsflash! The future is here.

All the italicized text above was generated using the Open AI Playground. I wrote the opening paragraph as a prompt, and the machine did the rest.

Let’s try a little more. I’ll feed all the text above, including this sentence, into the machine, and we’ll see where it takes us.

The machine learning algorithm used by the Open AI Playground is based on a model called GPT-2. GPT-2 is a transformer model trained on a huge dataset of around 8 million web pages. The training aimed to predict the next word in a sentence, which is a task that transformer models are very good at. When the model was released to the public, it quickly became clear that it was very good at generating text that sounded like it was written by a human. This is because the model has been trained on a huge amount of human-written text. The text generated by the machine is very good, but it is not perfect. There are some errors, and the grammar is not always correct. However, the text is usually easy to read and understand. It is clear that the machine is getting better at generating human-like text, and it is possible that, in the future, the machine will be able to generate text that is indistinguishable from human-written text.

If you think that’s a little creepy, you’re in good company. Last summer, a 谷歌 engineer named Blake Lemoine made headlines when he seemed to lose his marbles and made the bold claim that the company’s language model has a soul. Google swiftly laid the matter to rest by denying the claim of sentience and promptly firing the engineer. Case closed for now. I have a feeling we’ll look back one day and see Lemoine for what he is — an early casualty in our collective struggle to make sense of where we’re headed.??

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen the writing on the wall for roughly three decades. It was still all fun and games in 1996 when an IBM computer called Deep Blue destroyed Garry Kasparov, the world’s best chess player, in a history-making tournament. A story in The Guardian from the time put it this way:

“…the world’s greatest chess player has been beaten for the first time in a full-length game by the desiccated calculations of a sliver of silicon. This marks a milestone in the progress of artificial intelligence.”

Around this time, technologists and pundits worth listening to started forecasting the Singularity. One of the more prescient prognosticators is Ray Kurzweil, who, in 2005, set the date for the Singularity as 2045. Whenever it occurs, there can be little doubt that the Singularity will usher in the most disruptive technological shift in the history of humankind with profound and irreversible implications for, well, everything and everyone. In the meantime, there are a lot of interesting roads ahead to travel on our short trip from here to there. One of those roads is how we define what is “consciousness.” As Lemoine’s case suggests, it going to get a little tricky.

“As we eliminate various problems with these large language models, more and more people will accept that they’re conscious,” Kurzweil said on the Lex Fridman Podcast. “And when we get to 2029, I think a large fraction of the people will believe that they’re conscious.”

This sounds like the stuff of Hollywood because it is. GAMERANT says these are the best Sci-Fi Movies About A.I. Taking Over (Excluding Terminator):

2001: A Space Odyssey

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Westworld

The Matrix

I, Robot

Transformers

WALL-E

Ex Machina

Avengers: Age of Ultron

I wouldn’t know if these movies are the best because I don’t enjoy Sci-Fi flicks much. They make me anxious. None of them ever seems to share an idea for a future I’d like for my kids. To a picture, they’re dystopian thrill rides that land in ugly places. But you don’t need George Orwell’s imagination to figure out where A.I. is headed. That, of course, would be right in our direction.

When I shared Open AI Playground with a handful of my writer friends, contemporaries roughly my age, and encouraged them to mess around with it, this is the kind of text reply I got back:

“It’s definitely getting better. Just hope it struggles with telling stories until I can retire.”

I fed the reply to the machine to see what it might have to say about that.

I get it. We’re all just a bunch of Luddites at heart, clinging to the idea that the jobs we have now will be the jobs we have until we die. That’s a comforting thought. It’s also delusional. The writing is on the wall. The machines are coming for our jobs. All of them.

The end.

Or is it?