AI: the eminent danger today.

Having recently watched a video on the new and upcoming video creation AIs that will generate 30 minute documentaries from a single prompt, I thought it time I write about it.

This is a personal essay which may tell you more about who I am but also about my current thinking on the very real issues we are now facing. I believe this recent Gemini Google issue may be seen as a watershed moment for AI. Only time will tell.

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Many years ago, a few years after the beginning of the Internet, I was invited to give the keynote address at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Media conference in Austin Texas (back when it was smaller). The best thing about it is it's where I ended up meeting my wife.

I was then the co-founder and CEO of Human Code, a company engaged in various interactive media projects, including a game named FutureNet. This game featured Syd Mead as the concept artist and Bruce Sterling as the story writer. While I had previously worked with Syd on projects at NASA and elsewhere, meeting Bruce, a celebrated sci-fi writer and a pivotal figure in the cyberpunk genre, was a new experience for me.

At the very same SXSW conference, Bruce gave a most memorable talk. At the time, I thought it was quite the downer and attributed it to his darker predilections as a sci-fi author. In his talk he described the Internet as very dangerous. He said that every time you went online you would risk being robbed, scammed and your privacy being compromised.

This was so different from the early promise of the Internet and very hard for me and I'm sure many others to believe.

Although his outlook seemed overly pessimistic at the time, his predictions have proven remarkably prescient.

My interest in AI stems from a longstanding engagement with the field, tracing back to my work on the design of Texas Instruments' first AI workstation, the Explorer, in the early '80s.

Those machines used the languages Lisp and Prolog, which were essentially databases combined with huge chains of if-then else statements. Very similar to the original Siri.

They mostly created expert systems and had a very difficult time with any sort of general AI knowledge.

The technology pretty much stagnated until the advent of affordable parallel processors, neural networks, and deep learning, which ushered in a new era of AI innovation.

This technological advancement has been both exciting and promising, evidenced by my own experiences with AI, from purchasing a Tesla with full self-driving capabilities to assisting my wife with a project that involved creating superhero personas of people in our lives using AI and graphic design tools.

AI played a crucial role in bringing an enjoyable project to life for me. My wife has a fondness for classic video games, such as Pac-Man, prompting us to acquire a multi-game console. I designed ts exterior, for which I've shared some images. The fun part was using AI to transform family and friends into superhero figures, complete with striking resemblances. The images shown are representations of real individuals, reimagined as their superhero counterparts. This was mostly done through the use of tools like Midjourney, Inface, and Photoshop's generative fill feature, making the process both fascinating and entertaining.

I've also used AI to help me program an HTML5 canvas app to generate even-step grayscale images from a color photograph, even though I knew nothing about the HTML5 canvas API. That was impressive.

So, as far as I was concerned, this new AI promise looked pretty rosy to me.

In the past, we've had huge shifts in vocation and career opportunities based on technology. Moving from horse-drawn carriage to automobiles changed the lives of many stable owners, buggy whip manufacturers and affected all sorts of other industries.

I can remember when desktop publishing was just starting out and how threatened all of the graphic designers and layup artists were at the time. Soon they realized the simple fact they needed to relearn a vocation in order to stay relevant.

I think some of that is true for AI as well. If you look at AI as a tool and not as an end product you can see where concept designers, writers, programmers and others can use it to help them become better at their job. This is a nuanced discussion which I won't go into great detail here.

Now certainly, AI has and will continue to do a lot of good for humanity. Especially in the field of medicine and diagnostics as well as helping people learn about new subjects.

But, very much like Bruce Sterling's predictions concerning the Internet, I'm now starting to see the potential for the darker side of AI.

I think we're now starting slowly to turn the corner on the rosy outlook. Google's new Gemini has shown the world the tremendous potential for using AI to alter the perception of history and help control minds. I have now realized that even Google searches are way more biased than I had thought and only wonder how much they affect the thoughts and views of billions of people (Duckduckgo.com is certainly your friend).

AI has so permeated YouTube that it has become more and more difficult to find information on subjects you want to learn about. Just recently I was trying to do some research on a food processor and the majority of online reviews are AI generated with AI voices. Of course they are worthless and for some reason there's not a way to tell YT to ignore the channel.

This next generation of text to 30 min AI videos will flood YouTube with millions of instant documentaries on every subject imaginable, with no way to know how truthful or accurate or even interesting they are. Not to mention it will be super simple to put words into the mouths of any public figure and show them in videos doing things they shouldn't be doing. It will be very difficult anymore to actually look at video evidence and believe what you see.

People no longer read books. Now they tend to gather most all of their information from videos. This is why the new AI video technology is so alarming and threatening.

This is all happening in real time, it's not waiting for all the AIs to get together to take over the world and make us their slaves.

We do not need to wait for artificial general intelligence (AGI) to be fearful of what this technology can do. It is already poised to be the most significant propaganda weapon ever created.