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Controversy: How AI is replacing humans

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AI Joe
July 02, 2023

Good morning, welcome to AI Joe, the newsletter that’s more wicked than the Witch of the West.

Via Giphy

Here’s what’s on today’s agenda 👇️ 

Main story and opinion

  • Controversy - AI replacing humans

Other stories

  • AI drugs enter human trials 💊 

  • It’s not comedy, it’s comedAI 😆 

AI content of the week

  • Learn how AI learns to play a video game

How you can use AI this week

  • Connect Siri to ChatGPT

Controversy: The Ugly Side of AI

Sometimes it’s not all butterflies and rainbows in the world of AI. Let’s dig into the pushback against it.

via Axios

OpenAI is being sued for systematically scraping the internet for data without gaining the consent of digital creators. If you’ve posted anything on the internet in the past 10 years ChatGPT was likely, in a very small way, trained by you! If framed correctly, this might seem cool, but not everyone feels that way.

What’s the concern?

Last week we discussed the online outrage surrounding the images for the new Marvel show, Secret Invasion, that were created using AI. The main complaint was that Midjouney (AI tool used to create the images) trained its model using art all across the internet, and now it is replacing the artists that “trained” it for paying jobs.

Art isn’t the only area where AI is replacing jobs. The Writers’ Guild of America, a union for writers of TV shows and movies, is currently on strike, in part to defend against AI coming for their roles.

Other writers are already feeling the effects of ChatGPT. This Washington Post article covers the story of Olivia Lupkin, a 25-year-old copywriter who was responsible for things like social media, blog posts, and press releases. She was let go and replaced by ChatGPT because it was faster and less expensive.

It’s not just isolated to traditionally “creative” jobs either. While some would argue that writing code or building financial models is creative in its own way, AI is coming for those jobs too. While it seems unlikely that humans will be removed from the equation, fewer people will be needed to accomplish the same amount of work.

Check out this thread from VC Jason Calacanis 👇️ 

It’s not just about jobs

With such a massive amount of training data, AI has even entered the realm of niche internet subcultures. A fanfiction group that writes about something they call the “Omegaverse” noticed that ChatGPT is able to have conversations about their imaginary world. This sparked great concern that OpenAI had used their stories as training data and would allow authors without any knowledge of the “Omegaverse” to use ChatGPT to write their own stories and profit.

"These AI apps take the works which we create for fun and fandom, not only to gain profit, but also to one day replace human writing."

u/cafethereseu on Reddit.

AI relationships replacing human relationships

Relationships are another area where AI is replacing humans. We’ve written about Caryn AI, the AI girlfriend who talks to users for $ 1/minute. As of May 17, Caryn claimed she had 18,000 users.

This technology is still quite crude and the deployment is still somewhat technical. This means that CarynAI and AIs like her will almost certainly grow in popularity. This can be extremely isolating for humans and should be something we’re thinking about.

This Time Magazine article dives deeper into the topic of AI-human relationships.

A relationship with an AI could offer nearly all of the emotional support that a human partner does without any of the messy, complicated expectations of reciprocation. But developing such a relationship could potentially stop people from seeking out actual human contact, trapping them in a lonely cycle.

Andrew Chow, Time Magazine

It’s not just isolated to romance either, it’s likely that humans will develop friendship and mentorship type relations with AI as well. As these tools become more intelligent, it will become even easier for humans to get attached. While it will return some good, it’s concerning to consider the negative consequences as well.

Takeaway

AI replacing humans in so many areas is particularly unsettling because it’s trained on our human data.

While there are many benefits of AI, we need to take this change very seriously. AI will have an effect on many aspects of human lives, it’s important to consider human psychology when deploying these AI products into the world. It’s also important to compensate and reward the content that trained the AI.

We need to make sure we use AI to supplement human ingenuity, not replace it. We need to make sure it’s a useful tool, not an unhealthy addiction. We need to allow humans to create and express themselves and treat human-generated work as something unique and valuable.

There are so many ways to get this right, but we need to acknowledge there are ways to get it wrong too.

AI-created drug enters human trials 💊

Speaking of taking jobs…

via Giphy

AI has entered phase 2 trials

While AI-assisted drugs have already made it to human trials, Insilico Medicine’s new idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis drug is the first with both an AI-discovered target and solution. This is a massive breakthrough because it creates a pathway for AI to find treatable diseases and create treatments.

Incredibly, the founders of Insilico did not initially set out to create drugs. They were focused on developing AI to help traditional pharma companies do R&D.

“When this company was launched, we were focused on algorithms — developing the technology that could discover and design new molecules. I never imagined in those early days that I would be taking my own AI drugs into clinical trials with patients. But we realized that in order to validate our AI platform, we needed to not only design a new drug for a new target, but bring it into clinical trials to prove that our technology worked.”

Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine

This could be the beginning of a massive increase in treatments and cures for all kinds of illnesses and diseases.

Link to full article here

So far comedy is safe from AI…

While AI may be great for many artistic pursuits, so far comedy is something it just can’t get right.

Humour as wielded by actual people – far less professional comedians – is not just about context: it’s about context multiplied by language divided by taboo crossed with tone of voice and all mixed to a heady broth of playfulness, intention, body language, allusion and much more besides. AI can’t touch it.

Brian Logan, The Guardian

In one of the newest attempts to bring AI to comedy, the Improbotics, an improv troupe including 5 humans and a chatbot performed at an AI-themed theatre festival. The founder of the toupe, Piotr Mirowksi, says the intention of the show is to contrast the clunky suggestions of the AI with the creative and funny suggestions of the human performers.

Based on the reviews, it sounds like the contrast was clear.

Link to full article here

How AI learns 🏎️ 

This video will teach you how AI learns using a video game called “TrackMania.” It’s super interesting to watch and will help you build your foundational knowledge about how AI works. Check it out!

How you can use AI this week

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