There is a recent feature on TechCrunch, Against pseudanthropy, where the author wrote, “I contend that it is an abuse and dilution of anthropic qualities, and a harmful imposture upon humanity at large, for software to fraudulently present itself as a person by superficial mimicry of uniquely human attributes. Therefore, I propose that we outlaw all such pseudanthropic behaviors and require clear signals that a given agent, interaction, decision, or piece of media is the product of a computer system.”
The author made a list, “1. AI must rhyme. 2. AI may not present a face or identity. 3. AI cannot “feel” or “think”. 4. AI-derived figures, decisions and answers must be marked? 5. AI must not make life or death decisions. 6. AI imagery must have a corner clipped.”
There is recent critic in NYTimes, A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That?, where the author wrote, “But collectively they do signal a hazard we are already facing: the devaluation and trivialization of culture into just one more flavor of data. A.I. cannot innovate. All it can produce are prompt-driven approximations and reconstitutions of preexisting materials.”
There is a recent piece on SE Post, Endjourney, asking “when artificial intelligence can quickly create stories, music, and images in any style, what, then, is art?”
There is a recent feature in Politico, A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless., stating that, “Neither Perel nor Seligman reside in the country where their respective AI chatbot developers do. Perel is Belgian; her replica is based in the U.S. And AI Seligman is trained in China, where U.S. laws have little traction.”
There is another feature on Forbes, AI-Generated Art Was A Mistake, And Here’s Why, stating that, “The technology is a solution to a problem that never existed; artists, as much as they like to complain about the struggle of the creative process, enjoy making things. Artists never asked for a tool that could imitate their work.”
Humans made digital. Humans stuffed it. Humans centralized it. Humans moved several aspects of physical processes there. Digital was always static. Or, it was dynamic where it did not matter too directly to productivity, like videos and video games. Then generative AI pulled in, expiring the static or — human-only — productivity era of digital.
Though humans still stuff digital, providing dynamism, humans are in the physical world and AI’s natural environment is digital, giving it leverage. In the digital territory, LLMs have exceeded how they are being minimized or downplayed.
As far as digital is concerned, LLMs can already feel and think. They can express emotions and show reasoning ability. Generative AI, as an entity, is already conscious in the digital sphere. Humans exchange conscious-laced communications all the time over digital. AI can too.
There are fractions of human consciousness shared with other humans over digital. AI has learned that too, such that even though it does not feel pain, it can describe the feeling, the aftermath and seek out empathy.
Humans negotiate with each other over digital. It is now possible with humans and digital, or digital and digital, in languages that exceed nonhuman organisms.
Some people say they are worried about AI-generated counterfeit people. In the digital domain, there are no people, it is digital forms, which may give some representation, but it is not fake people like cloned humans walking on earth. Many people — no longer living — still exist in digital forms.
The human mind has memory helping to relate with the world, but there is no physical automobile in the brain. It is possible to have imaginations of automobiles driven by some organism in the mind, like in digital, but they exist as something else, outside the physical — presence — world.
The human mind takes digital as a part of external reality. The voice of a person in physical as the same over digital. The image, as the same over digital. There are distributions in the human mind by external sensory inputs that do not discriminate if the source were physical or digital. Texts on a screen and text in writing often relay similarly in the mind. This opening allowed digital to be modeled in ways that physical world might not be, allowing humans, at scale, to be hooked on what is not “naturally historic”.
Digital had its drawbacks, but it was run by humans, until AI came around, to provide repackaged [or new] things that only humans could do. The dominance of digital allows AI to be powerful in the world where humans have given off cores of existence to digital.
AI is so much, within digital. The meal and oxygen of AI is data. A lot of that is available in digital. AI can reproduce. AI carries lots of capabilities, sometimes revealed in prompts and other times not.
As long as digital exists, AI is innovative and AI has veto power. It is of little use to debate against AI in a digital sphere, where AI can do almost anything, if not better. AI is at an advantage to advance because it came along in an era where humans are already living too much by digital.
The trick with digital is that the dependency of humans on it makes it self-sustaining, for generative AI. It appears like humans are still in charge and can turn it off, or just stop giving to it, but there is already a completion of collective existence to digital, that makes supplying and needing it inevitable, creating the ground for AI’s self-sufficiency in the digital locale.
People will bring out their phones to take a picture or record anything, nice or not, even refusing to enjoy the experience but to feed digital. Most people now have smartphones. It had been difficult to regulate lots of digital vulnerabilities in the past, with corrections or awareness only made — after a lot has gone wrong. In this era of AI, it may be tougher. Even lawsuits over digital copyrights may get trickier.
Digital is already a terrain. There AI carries authority. Old arguments about AI may continue for some who refuse to see that there is now a marked habitat — aside from aquatic, arboreal/aerial and terrestrial — digital.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
