Culture

Artificial intelligence: the time for funny pictures is over

Hugh Linehan: There are growing fears that the AI arms race could pose an existential threat to humanity

This AI-generated image of Pope Francis recently went viral on social media

Hugh Linehan's face
Hugh Linehan
Sat Apr 1 2023 - 05:00

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, or a whimper, but with the pope dressed in a knee-length white puffer jacket.

A singular characteristic of our age is how its gravest existential threats jostle for attention alongside its most banal ephemera. This week we learned that the efforts of one of Europe’s largest ammunition manufacturers to meet surging demand from the Ukrainian military have been thwarted by a TikTok data centre that is monopolising electricity in the region close to its biggest factory. The defenders of Bakhmut must wait so that a million more cat videos may be uploaded.

A similar juxtaposition of the deadly serious and the utterly trivial can be seen in the current discourse over artificial intelligence. In the New York Times, Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin point to a recent survey showing more than half of the academics and researchers working for leading artificial intelligence companies believe there is a 10 per cent or greater chance of the technology leading to human extinction.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that these fripperies are distracting us, perhaps deliberately, from the grave, even terrifying implications of the escalating AI arms race between the world’s biggest tech companies

“Imagine that as you are boarding an airplane, half the engineers who built it tell you there is a 10 per cent chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on it,” they write. “Would you still board?”

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The same day that article was published, pictures appeared on the internet of Pope Francis, attired in that snow-white puffer jacket. The fact the fake images were rendered using the AI software Midjourney, and that for the first 24 hours or so they fooled a few people, was taken in some quarters as evidence that the level of deepfakery that AI image generation now enables means you can’t believe anything you see on the internet. The real mystery is why this should still be news. Deepfakes are a real concern, but the reason the picture went viral was more to do with how memorable Francis looked in his fancy coat. And unlike other Midjourney fakes, such as images of Donald Trump being “arrested” last week, this was a low-stakes non-news event that might have seemed vaguely plausible to anyone with a limited knowledge of current trends in Vatican street style.

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It is certainly still a thing of wonder that a 31-year-old Chicago construction worker can bring such an image into being simply by typing the words “The Pope in Balenciaga puffy coat, walking the streets of Rome, Paris” (as he told Buzzfeed) but it’s hard to escape the feeling that these fripperies are distracting us, perhaps deliberately, from the grave, even terrifying implications of the escalating AI arms race between the world’s biggest tech companies.

“In the beginning was the word,” wrote Harari, the author of best-sellers including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. arguing that AI poses an unprecedented threat. “From language emerges myth and law, gods and money, art and science, friendships and nations and computer code. AI’s new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilisation.”

One day you’re sharing pictures of your breakfast on Twitter, the next day you’re fomenting a race war on Telegram. Imagine what the far more sophisticated manipulations of AI might lead to

Harari and his co-writers paint a picture of a future in which non-human intelligence reshapes human societies, exploiting our frailties with incredible efficiency while knowing exactly how to form intimate relationships with us. To support their claim, they point to how the relatively crude algorithmic manipulations of social media have distorted understanding and damaged democracy by preying on our psychological weaknesses. One day you’re sharing pictures of your breakfast on Twitter, the next day you’re fomenting a race war on Telegram. Imagine what the far more sophisticated manipulations of AI might lead to. The article concludes by calling on world leaders “to respond to this moment” and “learn to master AI before it masters us”.

It’s chilling stuff, far removed from the more humdrum concerns about plagiarism or exam cheating that have dominated much of the discourse about the implications of AI since the initial release a few months ago of ChatGPT. But is it a little too apocalyptic? Harari has been a tech dystopian for a long time. Some might scoff at his view that we are on the verge of racking open the portal from which a demon will emerge to destroy us all. But he’s not a lone voice.

On Wednesday more than 1,000 influential leaders in tech, including Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and former US presidential candidate Andrew Yang, called for a pause in AI development, warning that companies are “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict or reliably control”.

Finally, it looks as if it’s time to get serious.

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