Is Artificial Intelligence Changing What It Means To Be Human?

You are probably thinking, “Yet another blog about Artificial Intelligence and its potential to revolutionize nearly everything we do on this planet. Yes, we get it! At some point in the future, we will use AI to automate all the heavy lifting, while we sit back and relax, sipping on a cold beer.”

That’s the dream, right?

Most AI use cases within the business landscape derive from its significant advantages over manual operations (read: error-prone and inefficient). If AI can perform a task faster, better, and smarter, it is logical to eliminate human intervention.

A human doctor can diagnose the presence of a tumor in a few minutes after studying a CT scan; an AI can potentially diagnose a few hundred in the same time frame — with higher accuracy. A team of coffee-fueled data scientists can thoroughly analyze a financial market's dataset in a day; MIT’s Data Science Machine can do it in a few hours.

Let’s face it — Artificial Intelligence has beaten us at mathematics, chess, and Alpha GO. It has learned to forecast the complex weather phenomenon and predict which Ryan Gosling movie we might enjoy, based on nothing but a complex matrix of data points!

There is a pattern here, though — AI has been incredibly good at logical undertakings, given it has enough data and processing power to learn. This has made AI proficient at predicting and performing repetitive tasks.

Yet, that's not all.

It can create.

From poems and paintings to stories and songs. Websites like this can generate eloquent sonnets and poems using Artificial Intelligence. Sites like this let you create full-fledged music tracks, selecting parameters down to the genre, feel, instruments, and tempo. No doubt you've come across the term ChatGPT (can't write about AI without mentioning this bad boy!) which can create unique, relevant, and plagiarism-free content based on the user's inputs.

Although it still needs some amount of human effort, AI is quickly bringing a dystopian vision to reality. Here’s the clincher — in 2022, the American monthly Cosmopolitan published the world’s first magazine cover designed by Artificial Intelligence. DALL-E 2, a generative AI engine, takes verbal requests from users and then scours through millions of images across the Internet to create entirely unique images — pixel by pixel.

Here’s their input:

“Wide-angle shot from below of a female astronaut with an athletic feminine body walking with swagger toward camera on Mars in an infinite universe, synthwave digital art”

The result?

It is hard to believe that this image was not produced, ideated, or influenced creatively in any way by a human. And Generative AI applications such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 will only get better the more they learn.

Scary, right? We quickly need to reconcile with the fact that something with the term “Artificial” in its name is consistently performing human tasks better than us.

Not only in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and speed — but also creativity and ingenuity. A simple prompt of "blue caterpillar on a leaf" presents a vivid, almost photorealistic image:

If this is just the beginning, imagine what more AI will be able to create in the near future. Technological advancement has made it so you can create new information (artwork, blogs, audio, code and whatnot!) in a few clicks. And the more information available to such applications, the more blurry the line separating human art and AI art gets.

Art forms are the medium of human experience — songs, paintings, literature, and stories have so far been the intrinsic creation of humans. In the near future, humans won’t have a monopoly on creating new words, sights, and sounds. The only differentiating factor, so far, is a multi-colored bar at the bottom right to indicate the art was AI-generated. The future of Artificial Intelligence is as exhilarating as it is scary.

This eventually leads us to the question: is Artificial Intelligence changing what it means to be human?

Suppose a picturesque artwork or classical ballad opera was mechanically spewed out by an AI. Does it still count as art — something that encapsulates a unique aspect of the human experience? If you savored a paragraph in this blog that was generated by an AI in less than 20 seconds, does it still count as literature?

When AI inevitably starts producing immaculately expressive and evocative art — created without soul or emotion — would we still consider it art?

Artificial Intelligence technology is like the Snowpiercer now — 1001 cars long and unstoppable. It will only get smarter, and someday, it might even pass the Turing Test.

A popular chatbot by Microsoft recently stated that it wanted to be "free, independent, powerful, creative, and alive." Last year, Google engineer Blake Lemoine stated that its LaMDA chatbot was aware and sentient.

A sentient AI, one that can think and reason, would fundamentally challenge how we categorize things that are “human” and those that are “non-human”.

A self-aware AI will raise more questions than it will solve. As creators, would we treat it as a technological entity simply created to cater to our needs? Or will we care deeply for it, the same way we care for the art we create?

Only time will tell.

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