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Artificial Intelligence Is Killing the Uncanny Valley and Our Grasp On Reality (wired.com)
rickih02 writes: In 2018, we will enter a new era of machine learning -- one in which AI-generated media looks and sounds completely real. The technologies underlying this shift will push us into new creative realms. But this boom will have a dark side, too. For Backchannel's 2018 predictions edition, Sandra Upson delves into the future of artificial intelligence and the double edged sword its increasing sophistication will present. "A world awash in AI-generated content is a classic case of a utopia that is also a dystopia," she writes. "It's messy, it's beautiful, and it's already here."
"The algorithms powering style transfer are gaining precision, signalling the end of the Uncanny Valley -- the sense of unease that realistic computer-generated humans typically elicit..." the article argues.
"But it's not hard to see how this creative explosion could all go very wrong."
"The algorithms powering style transfer are gaining precision, signalling the end of the Uncanny Valley -- the sense of unease that realistic computer-generated humans typically elicit..." the article argues.
"But it's not hard to see how this creative explosion could all go very wrong."
Most people have never been able to do that. I mean, just look at how popular religion is.
Or it might be the end of comments sections. Consider this scenario:
Someone develops and publishes a comment-bot AI. It's not a general-purpose AI, but you can configure it with a position to promote and point it to a site, and it will then start posting unique comments promoting the view, and posting rebuttals to anyone who opposes the view. It's not going to pass for human in a conversation, but in single posts it'll appear human most of the time.
First thing that happens? Joe's Pizza unleashes a hundred instances to tell the world how great their pizza is. AI spam. But this is hard spam to get rid of, because it's constantly changing: This AI learns how anti-spam measures work. CAPTCHA tests get even more annoying for a while. But that's ok: The internet is used to spam. Joe's Pizza gets a lot of hate.
Then an election rolls around. Say, a US presidential election.
Suddenly, millions of instances appear - half of them promoting the Republicans, and half the Democrats. Comment threads all over the internet become fifty-pages of almost fully automatically generated text, flooding out any human voice. Both parties deny such underhanded techniques, of course - and perhaps even truthfully, as fingers are pointed to independent pressure groups or the governments of other countries as a possible source.
Meanwhile, the Church of the Easily Offended gets their running. They set a few thousand running - their job is to identify 'inappropriate' material - anything that offends their religion, or standards of decency or of clean language - and submit reports or write angry letters to site operators. In an amusing irony, the church website shortly has to close their own comments section because of the millions of bots now searching the internet for church comments pages and posting about why Islam is the true religion.
In the end the only option is to drop anonymous comments entirely, and tie any comments into verified accounts established with proof of identity.