We'll Be Catching Up To AI For Years (Maybe Decades)

AI Combined With a Mobile, Social Web Will Change Life As We Know It

It’s been a while since I’ve been on a media stage such as the one the BBC provides, but that’s where I found myself recently. And props to the BBC as the context behind my appearance was their coverage on a story revolving around child exploitation and AI. I say props to them because stories like what I’m about to summarize can easily be overlooked in a hyperactive AI news cycle where there is nearly a daily deluge of huge deals and alliances being formed—we’re trained to follow the money, and the money is following AI. The first BBC story takes place in a small town in Spain where AI-generated images of nude underage girls began circulating digitally. The bodies weren’t real, but the faces were—likely leveraged from social media accounts or similar. From the BBC :

“The pictures were created using photos of the targeted girls fully clothed, many of them taken from their own social media accounts. These were then processed by an application that generates an imagined image of the person without clothes on. So far more than 20 girls, aged between 11 and 17, have come forward as victims of the app's use in or near Almendralejo, in the south-western province of Badajoz.”

I made it an intentional point to share this story on LinkedIn precisely because it was reported on the same day that all business news coverage was on Amazon’s massive deal with Anthropic. It’s also worth noting that literally hours after the Amazon Anthropic news—Open AI unveiled its multimodal ChatGPT features, nothing short of game-changing. Spoiler alert—ChatGPT will turn into the kinds of assistants that Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant have always promised to be. The advancements in AI are head-spinning, but they also extend beyond the business world. Another story that the BBC covered, referenced during my interview, was the news of a South Korean man arrested and sentenced to 2 years in prison for generating images nude images of children using AI prompts . This part of the story is worth thinking about:

Citing the images’ lifelikeness, the court rejected the man’s claims that the images could not be considered sexual exploitation of children.

Based on the above, I can only surmise that the pictures themselves were not actual photos of nude minors but AI-generated images that were realistic enough for a South Korean court to make a ruling on. It begs several questions:

- What datasets was that generative AI model trained on?

- Do the makers of the AI bear any responsibility? And if so, how much?

Also, all of the above underscores something I’ve been saying recently. And that is that prompt fields are the new search boxes. The valuable data that flows through Google’s entry point of the search box can tell you a lot about a person’s intent—just as what this South Korean man was typing into his prompt field to generate the images he was trying to create. And finally—a point that I made to the BBC producer but could not drive home on the short and fast-paced interview: We cannot and must not look at AI in isolation. Much like what happened in the Spanish story, the combination of mobile and social technologies along with AI makes possible the generation and distribution of exploitative images. A commenter on my LinkedIn post about the Spanish story reminded me that much of this could be done with Photoshop.

Yes and no.

We had digital cameras before everyone got a high-powered video studio in their pocket, and we had text and e-mail before we had social networks… The point is that technology, like generative AI, drastically reduces friction points and allows anyone who can type simple commands to “make” things that previously would have taken more time, knowledge, and skill. And we cannot lose sight that these creations will exist in a world of disappearing messages, viral videos, and short-form content in a never-ending supply.

In less than a year, we’ve seen both the proliferation and adoption of AI technologies advance in real-time. Over the next few months, the landscape and power dynamics will likely shift and evolve. Over the next few years, the dominant players will be in place, and industries will be significantly impacted. But it will probably take decades to adapt to these changes in a world where we are still grappling with the advancements of mobile and social and their impact on our daily lives. Now, we’re adding AI into the mix—and it will work in concert with the technological revolutions that came before it, compounding its transformative nature.

We’ll be catching up for decades.