AI Can’t Be Beautiful
At least, not yet
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“The greed for destination obliterates the journey” — John O’Donohue
Well, my fellow Gen Xers, it’s finally happening —we’re being confronted with two persistent threats that have plagued us since the seventies.
The first is that machines are almost smart enough to replace every single one of us without exception. It’s not just factory workers and chess players that have something to fear. It’s artists, musicians, actors, writers, surgeons, lawyers, and toll booth operators.
AI-generated art is the latest iteration of this, but it’s been coming for a long time. There’s even a term for it, which is as horrific as you might expect: AI singularity.
From what I can tell, AI singularity is still conceptual. It refers to the moment that machines become smarter than us. There’s a company called Translated that’s attempting to quantify AI singularity by measuring the accuracy of AI-generated language translation. According to them, AI is quickly closing the gap between what expert human translaters can achieve versus optimized machine translation.
How close are we to reaching singularity? Well, Translated says we have seven years until AI can translate speech as well as a human translator.
I guess this means we still have time to unplug everything and pretend we never invented big data and Google and algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves.
Let’s be honest. It’s far too late to stop what’s coming. We’ve been tethered to the internet for two decades, feeding it a bottomless diet of our words, pictures, music, video, and art. It won’t be long until the machines are better at being human than we are or (more likely) pretending to be human. This brings me to the second threat: the robot uprising.
We were warned about this eventuality in countless movies. First, we had Hal, the sentient computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hal starts out as a kind, helpful AI system, until he goes mad and murders the humans he’s supposed to protect.
That movie was released a few years before I was born. I watched it several times as a child. I didn’t understand much at the time, but that’s the first example I had of AI and it imprinted itself on…
