AI Me

Every day I am reminded that I am product of the Twentieth Century, and the Millennials will soon run the world. Maybe after the Millennials, the computers will run us.  <Insert heavy, exasperated sigh here.>

Samantha is using new Artificial Intelligence to write stories, render artwork, and make likenesses of her.  So I gave her about ten pictures of me and within a few minutes the AI spit out a half dozen pictures of "me". The results are, well, disturbingly amazing. As I was sharing the pics with a friend, he shared that he went to a wedding where the Best Man wrote a toast using AI and the results were heartfelt, well, disturbingly amazing. 

I can now feed a computer a few key words and get an essay, speech, piece of art, or selfie and have it be remarkably genuine to my personality and traits.  It really blurs the line of what is mine and what is generated by a series of algorithms based on my preferences.  Over the past decade the data giants like Google, facebook, Instagram, etc. have culled our posts and searches and have a digital profile of each of us who have ever searched content online.  Corporations can have their profiles of us, but what does it mean when we outsource our creativity and artistic ability to a computer that can reflect a semi-accurate, if not a little hazy image of us?    

This technology is so seductive.  I never had the talent to be an artist or good writer – until now. I can key word thunderstorm plus Grand Canyon plus abandoned cabin and render artwork that looks like something you would be willing to pay for.  I can enter key words cattle drive plus frontier plus family plus tragedy and have AI write a story about a family who established a home near the Grand Canyon to drive cattle to Flagstaff, Arizona that fell upon some disaster and disappeared from the face of the earth.  The artwork can be on the front cover of the book.

Where does all of this go?  Can we outsource “thinking” and “intellect”? How does a university professor know where the thoughts of a student ends and the AI begins?  Is an artist an artist if the computer renders the image?  Should/would people pay for that art when they can make similar images using the same program? What if the AI one day decides it doesn’t want its work shared?  Science Fiction, right?! Is it?

As long as it makes me look good and sound smart, I suppose.

This last thought is a tangent, but one that must be considered. The technology that (helps) run our lives might be a huge crutch that we do not know how to walk without.  I once commented to a fellow Army officer that our force was the most technologically advanced in the world.  He shot back that we were the most technologically reliable in the world.  The days of "stubby pencil" planning and solving "things" has been supplanted. When system goes down, and it will go down one day, we will lack the skills to help ourselves.

I am an Analog Kid in a computer-generated world.  

It might be a best seller - just saying...