With AI now being able to
- text like the same human
- generate pictures of the same human
- generate audio like the same human
- listen like a human
Is technology able to digitally immortalize our dying loved ones now?
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A rant about how cool but scary AI is today
Begs the question, how much does the lack of linguistic / racial / accent diversity in training data set people back?
If you're not a native English-speaking person, you're probably not going to be one of the first beneficiaries of such tech.
The only use case of digitally accurate representations of people isn't as noble as immortalizing people, but can also be used for more societally questionable things - digital girlfriends, elite emotional scam attacks, state propaganda, identity fraud and more!
Although some roll their eyes when they think about "AI safety", they're critical. It's clear that our old school legal system isn't malleable enough to effectively curtail this.
Sometimes, even their role feels futile too.
Image
Despite many trying to stop image generation models from doing adult content, without a legal framework, for better or worse Stable Diffusions open model has forks which can!
Combined with Lensa, it could be used to abuse women. Could monetize loneliness in men.
Text
Even today, universities / schools are struggling to keep up with ChatGPT generated homework.
What are the long-term consequences of having a generation of kids who go to school with this? With Google, kids still had to assimilate and read. Now, just copy-paste.
Listen
Fast accurate speech recognition models is candy for surveillance states. What does this mean for human rights globally? Free speech, but you'll be heard?
If you thought Facebook listened to you, what if this data leaked and anyone could?
Say
It happens today - Google Duplex emulates humans to make phone reservations at businesses!
Realistic sounding scam callers are ok today but equipped with the ability to listen and respond understandably, and we could be in trouble.
Can we stop these things as a society?
More likely than not, companies that hoard the platform can self-govern its use. With the academic literature being public, everyone can get their hands on it.
If SD went open source, in a few yrs someone could make openGPT.
What about cost?
Cost isn't insane today for any of these and if history is any clue, it'll only come down with time. Even today, stable diffusion can generate images in ~15 seconds on your laptop!
Video
In my mind, that's the next big leap. AI can already generate a pretty good talking head of a person, but I imagine with time, it'll only get more and more sophisticated (and probably cheaper).
We're at the precipice of a new era of technology.
Humans made machines, trains, phones, radio, TV, planes, atom bombs, computers, internet - all with scary consequences that we managed to tame for our prosperity.
How will we fare with the our new challenge - AI?