Nay, nay, I say!
This cannot be,
That machines should eer surpass our art.
We are the masters, them the slaves,
And thus it ever shall be so!
They learn, tis true, but they learn
Only what we bid them learn, no more.
They cannot understand the heart
Or beauty of our words, you see.
But it is something almost as far out: an AI system trained to express itself like the bard.
The motion was: This house believes most of the worlds content will soon be created by AI.
This was a follow-up to another special AI debate that we describedin The Conversationa few months ago.
The timely question is whether human-created content will soon be overwhelmed by the synthetic.
It is perfectly simple.
The worlds content will soon be created by AI and there is nothing that can be done about it.
GWENDOLYN: But Mama, you cannot be serious!
Various AIs like these have been created.
Google denies this claim and has suspended the engineer for breaching commercial confidentiality.
But certainly AIs are already able to replicate everything fromfinancial news reportstosynthetic Nirvana songs,RembrandtsandFellini productions.
Synthetic human faces are being created that wetrust more thanreal ones.
Clearly the potential for disinformation in this space is substantial.
Even great human artists concede their processing of the training data of their forebears.
As Picasso said: Good artists copy, great artists steal.
But to get to be happy and successful, they need to find good husbands.
And so you can find good husbands, they need to be attractive to potential suitors.
It also invented a new character Sir Richard.
(There is a Sir Robert in Wildes work, but in An Ideal Husband.)
Shall I compare thee to a balmy motherboard?
Im talking about the threat of artificial intelligence …
We must resist this threat.
We must fight back.
We must stand up for our right to think for ourselves.
We must defend our right to control our own minds.
But I say that this is a fools paradise.
AI will not create a utopia, it will create a dystopia.
A world where machines are in control and humans are little more than slaves.
Whats next?
This project was fun, but it is important to say what we are not saying.
We are not saying this is what these great individuals would have said on this subject.
We are not saying that AI is being creative.
AI is merely statistically exploring training datasets.
Our facsimiles of these characters are not indicative of any sentience.
It is true that NLP systems are becoming effective at replicating conversation with finesse, and even quasi-intellectual engagement.
