Artificial intelligence has drastically advanced over the past few years,  few people even understand how it works let alone understand the implications it has on the future.  AI is quickly becoming “the next big thing” in the technology world, finding its way into almost every new piece of technology being released.  Now since it’s being marketed to consumers as an exciting new technology to make our lives easier, many people won’t think twice about some of the horrifying implications this technology has on the future of humanity.  Since AI is becoming such a large unstoppable behemoth, I will only be discussing the aspects of it that may concern you as an individual.  AI generated text, photo, and video will directly lead to a decline in the quality and general enjoyment of your life.  This will be accomplished by slowly but drastically replacing aspects of your life that you don’t even think about on a daily basis.  In 2024 nearly every aspect of a person’s life is entirely digital.  For most of us that’s not even a choice anymore, virtual classes, virtual conversations, hell younger generations may even have entirely digital relationships without having ever seen the person they are speaking to in real life.  The majority of all the films and television shows of human history can be accessed on a smartphone.  Most people rely entirely on social media outlets for their news and information.  All this to say that humans are no longer relying on what they see or experience in the real world, but rather what they see and experience within this virtual universe we have found ourselves in.

AI generated text is actually a much larger concern that you may have thought.  With so much of our life being influenced by entirely digital spaces, AI has a dangerous amount of potential to corrupt that.  “When examining political images and their AI-generated captions, the representational harm of erasure is most notable for ignoring or failing to recognize social groups’ important attributes, artifacts, or landmarks, which could lead to dehumanization and discrimination.”  This article discusses the dangerous implications of AI generated text being used in social media captions.  While this may not seem like a huge deal to some, in reality AI text being used this way could be detrimental to news and reliable information.  Not to mention how lazy it is, AI text just doesn’t have the complexity to make accurate or detailed comments on a topic like writers or journalists do.  By continuously allowing AI to replace real human jobs, we as a people would be sacrificing not just detailed and nuanced conversation, but also just the quality of information and content as a whole.  As shown in the article, AI has no comparison to man made work, when shown an image of two Afghan women in burqas carrying bags of clothes, the AI annotated caption was simply “a couple of people wearing blue and yellow raincoats”.  This is because the “intelligence” in artificial intelligence is not an artificially created human brain, but a series of algorithms looking for patterns.  This may seem like a tame example but as the article suggests, AI generated captions could lead to massive generalization of social groups and events that would end up coming off as irrelevant or misinformed.  

Given the tense social and political climate of the world, the last thing we need is AI stoking the flame by mischaracterizing people, events, or even political parties and presidential candidates.  It all seems a little dehumanizing, and the presence of this technology will just devalue everything humanity has worked so had for.  What’s the point of forming an original thought if your AI doohickey can have a thought for you, maybe it could analyze all your friends opinions and decide which thought is most palatable for them, god forbid us humans use this brain of ours for once.  AI is already capable of managing entire social media profiles, so theoretically someone could create a few AI chatbots to target their political opponents, to create the illusion that they have more opposition then they really do.  

There’s a lot of specific situations and hypotheticals when it comes to AI, it’s all valuable to take into account when discussing something that can evolve so rapidly.  Now something that has been going on with AI generated images and videos in particular has gotten much worse over the past couple years, and could spell a very disturbing future for pretty much everyone publicly online.  Deep Fakes are a form of altered photo or video content that puts someone’s face on someone else’s body.  This previously required a lot of technical ability to pull off and have it look realistic, but with very accessible AI technology it takes little to no effort.  While some people may try to pass this off as an innocent video trick that some content creators may use for celebrity impressions, the more disturbing and more prominent use for this is pornography and blackmail.  “Personal security risks emerge as DeepFake can be used to fabricate convincing yet false representations of individuals, leading to reputation damage and psychological distress for anyone with accessible personal images or videos.”  This article discusses the dark side of this AI technology and gives fair warning to anyone who has publicly accessible photos or videos online.  There are many cases of this technology being used to take the likeness of an actress and digitally render them onto the body of a more promiscuous type of actress.  This is the disturbing truth of what happens when AI gets into the wrong hands, people’s privacy and professional reputation could be on the line.  Any sick and twisted individual could access this technology and use it to conjure up anything they could imagine, which when including the likeness of people who did not consent to such images is involved, is something that should just not be allowed.  It could be under other circumstances too, there have been cases of people losing their jobs over AI fabricated videos of them using slurs or engaging in acts their employer doesn’t want to be associated with.  So far, artificial intelligence hasn’t provided anything for mankind, but it certainly has created a whole new set of problems for us.  Not to mention the grim implications it has on the future.

resources :

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2023.1245684/full

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/OCJ-08-2022-0014/full/html#sec006