We all know the story of the Terminator films and how the addition of Artificial Intelligence into humanity's life started out with good intentions and just like they say, the road to disaster is paved with good intentions.
These days, almost any aspect of online life has some sort of AI involved with it and you need look no further than the comment section of this very website in order to realize that this is true. I often get comments that are very wordy from an account that posts similarly "flowery" comments with everything that they say and I become suspicious when I see one of those. I want to say I kind of have an eye for detecting AI, but AI is getting better at its job and in many cases is almost imperceptible from something that was actually written by a real person.
src
personally, I don't use AI for very much in my life but that probably has a great deal to do with my age and whether I want to admit it or not, I am becoming less and less inclined to adopt new technology into my life because I actually don't want to learn anything new. I realize that by not doing that I could actually be making life less convenient for myself but as they say "if it aint broke, don't fix it."
Recently AI has been making what a lot of people claim is "mistakes" but there is a part of me that kind of things that AI is actually doing this sort of thing on purpose in an effort to test the gullibility of humanity. Perhaps that is me thinking too far ahead and no, before you ask, I am not afraid of AI nor do I think it is going to take over.
In a recent story I read on AP - which is a news organization that itself has lost a great deal of credibility in the past 15 years or so - talked about how many publications, in a presumed effort to remain solvent by eliminating paid human positions is turning to AI to create content for them. One such organization is a little-known organization named King Features that publishes a wide variety of content that is aimed mostly at people who enjoy reading.
In an article that was published that was about top works of fiction that people should read left their audience kind of confused when many readers pointed out that they couldn't actually find the books anywhere that the list suggested.
src
this book actually does exist
After pushing the publisher to answer inquiries the management of "King Features" finally admitted that they didn't write the article and they had merely asked AI to write it for them. They also didn't check the output to make sure that it was legitimate, which is a rather large problem with a lot of AI generated content these days.
The list of fictional books contained a number of books that are, quite literally, "fiction," meaning that the books, just like fictional stories, don't in fact, exist.
There were two titles that AI suggested that readers check out that were penned by actual existing authors and the authors are real people but AI suggested books that do not exist written by them or by anyone else. It is quite amusing to me that AI presented a very reasonable summary of the plot to the point where a casual editor wouldn't immediately be able to discern if they are real or not. I mean, nobody knows EVERY single book that has been written now, do they?
One of the supposed authors responded on Twitter to the article stating "I have not written and will not be writing a novel called "Nightshade Market" which was one of the books suggested on the list.
Thankfully, the "author" of the list immediately spilled the beans, took full responsibility, and also suggested that any backlash that he receives will be deserved.
One user on X said exactly what I was thinking
While I will admit that I don't know a great deal about AI and am perfectly fine with remaining ignorant about it, I think that if AI has evaluated the entirety of human history and human behavior, to it, fucking with people with subtle lies would be a very effective method of communication because if you look at basically anyone that has risen to power, they did so at least in part, but being kind of full of S**T at times.
To me, I do not like the fact that certain aspects of society are tasking AI with creating things for us without having any sort of checks an balances. That's kind of the entire warning behind the Terminator films, isn't it? A list of books is far from equivalent to weaponry, I know, but it is kind of a sign of where things are going and I for one do not like it.