We’re All Cold War Spies in the AI Era
Cultivate an attitude of distrust and settle in for the cyberpunk future literally none of us wanted.
That call from your mother? It’s fake. This isn’t sci-fi: people are being robbed right now.
Let’s get something straight: what we currently call “AI” isn’t the artificial intelligence of Star Trek. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and all the other implementations may be extremely early groundwork for Data (or the Borg), but any hint of “intelligence” is just a clever language trick. Which is why these “AI” services are called Large Language Models (LLMs). They’re samples of massive pools of data, trained to respond in predictable ways (with sometimes hilariously non-predictable results).
The danger of LLMs is not that they are going to rise up, Terminator-style, and demand Sarah Connor’s life. The danger is in how we human beings use this new technology. Long term? The corporations will happily see us all plugged in like the human batteries in The Matrix — short term? Well, in the short term, criminals are going to make your already difficult life even worse.
A few years back, headlines were made when an AI-generated voice was used to steal $220,000 from a UK energy company. The Washington Post reported that the “software was able to imitate the…
