In honor of National Poetry Month, letter writer Mick Souder of Durango asked artificial intelligence to write a poem, “AI In Charge,” published on Sunday in The Durango Herald and The Journal.
Souder has taken a dive into ChatGPT, working on drafts of technical documentation. He’s seen the merits and shortfalls, the time saved and the scrubbing needed for AI-produced content.
AI is both helpful and a little scary. Note, this excerpt from Souder’s AI-generated poem on AI, which, “took our dreams with their lies./We once thought we had the power,/To rule the world, hour by hour./But now we see that we were wrong.”
For first-timers, using AI can be haunting as machines come across as sentient beings. Word choices can be disarmingly and achingly humanlike. And there’s hope for AI to solve the problems we humans haven’t been able to – stopping mass shootings and spotting a weapon in a crowd. It could also figure out problems that affect the Southwest, possibly even the Colorado River water allocation system.
AI’s potential is profound.
Already, AI has made one gigantic scientific leap. Google’s deep-learning program for determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence could transform biology, as reported in Nature in November 2020.
News that this work was shared publicly evoked very human feelings of common goodwill in solving global problems. Gratitude, too.
Some researchers have a more accurate name for AI. Artificial Generated Intelligence. A primer on AI. AI computes, practices tasks, learns by trial and error, and builds memory on how to do things. It replicates. And plans. It has “read” everything on the internet, but it is not the internet. AI appears to “think,” but it cannot. Instead, it predicts what comes next, for example, in writing a sentence.
To be predictable, AI needs humans.
It’s one thing for AI to write about, for example, pain. It’s quite another to have felt pain in order to write about it. AI doesn’t know the breadth of human experiences, the spectrum of sensations, what it’s like to feel loved or unloved.
AI develops what looks like creativity in problem solving because it’s practiced. But, again, it’s not human, no matter how well it mimics us. Return to humans if you want the real deal in creativity.
One bug is that AI “hallucinates,” making errors in confidence, a nagging problem that computer engineers haven’t been able to fix.
For example, ask AI about books on a particular subject and it’s capable of fabricating them, complete with book covers and fake descriptions and images of authors who don’t actually exist.
When it comes to fake news, AI could effortlessly create and spread misinformation with fictional stories around fictional characters and images that are not real. It could build its own fever dream of a world.
This all happens at warp speed, making it seem believable.
AI technology has us returning to that large existential statement – what it means to be human. How we can utilize AI, rather than the other way around. AI brings us to a juncture in the evolution of Homo sapiens. How will AI bring out the good and evil in us?
Locally, how can we use AI to benefit Southwest residents?
This moment in time does feel like the proverbial turning point for humans in the way that the internet, modern medicine and, dare we say, the invention of the wheel and discovery of fire changed lives. We’re on the verge of a genesis. AI will definitely change us.
And our jobs. AI is expected to reinvent existing jobs, create new ones and replace others. Such as writers.
AI excels at producing content. But that pesky hallucination problem means AI is highly imperfect. Just like humans.
For newspapers, if we were to use this emergent technology, it would be in support of work produced by 100% real people. Cutting time off research that can become drudgery. But, looking ahead, that learning curve is loaded with lurking unknowns.
AI could be a tool to align with human values, such as morality. It could potentially discern treaties and conflicting laws, and sort out forms of abuse. Those kinds of things.
Humility is required in approaching and deploying AI. Journalists will have to move slowly and use it carefully. Besides coders and computer scientists, we hope ethicists and social scientists are involved in the processes and evolution of AI.
Writers, too.
