Tech companies say artificial general intelligence systems will move our society forward. But the cost to our humanity may not be worth it.
OpenAI claims to “ensure that AGI benefits all humanity,” but in reality it threatens the very concept of humanity.
(Photo: CFOTO / Future Publishing via Getty Images)
OpenAI’s latest system, Sora, creates videos based on text prompts. You write a prompt and Sora does the rest. The result: highly photorealistic videos and endearing animations. From mammoths wandering in a snowy meadow has a market full of people in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2056. Nothing seems too wild for Sora’s imagination.
Sora is not yet available to the general public, as OpenAI is first letting “red teams” evaluate the product for its potential for abuse. OpenAI also asked creative professionals for their feedback on how Sora could benefit them, presenting Sora as a tool that could improve their production.
At the same time, however, technologies like Sora can render many creations useless. Last month, famed director and producer Tyler Perry halted an $800 million studio expansion after seeing what Sora is capable of. This would save him from having to build sets or travel to film on location. “I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which shocks me,” he said. The Hollywood Reporter.
It’s no surprise that advances in AI have sparked debates about the future of work as well as concerns about the future of work. disinformation, biasAnd copyright violations. In response to these backlashes, technology companies have (virtually) signaled their consideration of these issues by emphasizing the importance of ethical AI, responsible AI, or trustworthy AI and developing guidelines for these noble goals. Indeed, the OpenAI website includes the disclaimer that despite extensive testing, it cannot predict all the possible advantages and disadvantages of its technology, and that (ironically) releasing (potentially dangerous) AI into the real world is essential to increasing AI safety over time.
Policymakers are also actively discussing how to regulate AI in order to prevent or, at least, limit the aforementioned problems. In fact, earlier this month the EU adopted the Landmark AI lawwhich includes prohibitions and restrictions related to biometric identification systems, manipulative uses of AI, and artificial general intelligence (AGI, or AI with human-level or higher intelligence and the ability to self- learn).
While the widespread attention to AI ethics is to be welcomed, it distracts from a deeper problem. Focusing on ways to regulate and improve AI confirms a techno-determinist narrative, which does not question the overall desirability of technological progress and assumes that AI and AGI are inevitable. However, as a society, we need to ask ourselves whether generative AI systems like Sora actually bring progress and whether these systems should be welcomed in the first place.
Current problem
OpenAI claims “to ensure that AGI benefits all humanity”, but in reality, it threatens the very concept of humanity. We are beyond AI just beat us at chess and Go, price optimizationAnd recognize faces. Although these previous steps were impressive, shocking, and perhaps even humiliating to those with a strong sense of human superiority, this technology “simply” automated routine, rule-based tasks. Now, as our preventive concerns regarding super intelligence have slowly subsided, AI has begun to master an area that many long thought was uniquely human: the realm of creativity and imagination.
Creativity and imagination are related but different phenomena. HAS create or to be creative means to materialize a vision or idea in a painting, film, song, etc. HAS imagine goes even further. Imagination first requires the ability to develop this vision – to see what has not yet manifested itself. Sora fills in the gaps in our prompts. The model not only understand prompts (a point that OpenAI emphasizes several times on the Sora site), but also conceived what the scenes described could and should look like. Yes, this imagination is based on training data, but so is ours.
For humans, imagination takes time and space to develop. But in our capitalist society, which determines our value based on productivity And volumeartists are told that AI will be useful to them because it will allow them to create more content so they can work faster. These promises of productivity make it easier for people to forget the fact that AGI-based intelligent systems are on track to have capabilities equal to or greater than humans. The imagination of AI will likely become more grandiose in the years to come.
We shouldn’t let the promise of productivity or narrow debates about the ethical implications of AI distract us from the bigger picture. Under the guise of improving humanity by increasing productivity, we risk releasing our ultimate replacement.
The sustainability of human skills in the face of technological progress should not be overestimated. Calculators have reduced the need for mental arithmetic. GPS has limited independent exploration and map navigation. While some might be happy to give up these skills, there must be a limit to the qualities we are willing to outsource.
Given AI’s current skills and capacity for imagination, it seems plausible that AI is not propelling humanity forward, as OpenAI claims, but rather threatening humanity, by deskilling us and making our unique characteristics redundant. This is why it is high time to discuss not only ethical implications such as copyright violations and algorithmic bias, but also what AI’s capacity for imagination means for humanity. What does it mean to be human when our distinctive and characteristic skills and traits are no longer ours alone?
It’s also crucial that we don’t let ourselves be misled by narratives about how ChatGPT and Sora will save humanity by making us more productive at work and in daily life, when they will likely primarily increase income for 1%. Ultimately, as AI continues to develop, we risk finding ourselves unskilled, uninspired, and dependent on our replacement. At that point, it will be too late to ask whether building AI was worth the loss of our humanity.
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