2024.
With AI like this, who needs lithium?
2024.
Doesn’t that sound like a year that’s impossibly in the future? Especially for those of us who remember when the year 2000 seemed quite far away.
It’s like the setting of a dystopian Sci-Fi blockbuster. You know, where there is constant, never-ending war, escalating climate change resulting in extreme temperatures and more frequent disasters, a right wing government acting against the interests of the people, AI making humans redundant, that sort of thing…
Oh.
Seems we’re here after all.
Ah the age old struggle between man and machine. I’m sure we can all remember where it all began. No, not those Luddite fellas, although you can tell why they were a bit pissed off. I’m talking much more recently - 1984.
Not the book. I’m talking mortal combat with machines, a fight for the survival of our very species. You’ve all seen the movie. The Terminator.
Funny thing is when the machines come for our jobs I wasn’t expecting it to be the ones that seemed most under threat in 2023.
You’d think with Artificial Intelligence able to deal with all manner of rules and formulas it would be suited to roles that involve less creativity, perhaps accountancy, engineering, some medical work. But this last year it seemed to be writers, artists, designers, and musicians who had cause to be concerned for the future. Like, even more than usual for those professions.
Utilising vast amounts of information we’re increasingly seeing writing, artwork, and music that has been produced by an AI. Many people are either concerned, or pissed off, by this. Or both, I guess.
US news organisation the New York Times is suing ChatGPT-owner OpenAI over claims its copyright was infringed to train the system.
The lawsuit claims "millions" of articles published by the New York Times were used without its permission to make ChatGPT smarter, and claims the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a trustworthy information source.
It alleges that when asked about current events, ChatGPT will sometimes generate "verbatim excerpts" from New York Times articles, which cannot be accessed without paying for a subscription.
In September a similar copyright infringement case was brought by a group of US authors including Game of Thrones novelist George RR Martin and John Grisham.
These AI systems utilise vast amounts of human work, artworks, literature, news articles, which they draw from. It essentially forms their “understanding” of the universe.
That would seem to be quite an unfair advantage over the people still creating those inputs, not to mention the free use of knowledge and creativity delivered by thousands of years of human effort.
2023 was a year in which people realised how quickly AI was coming for those creative jobs. The algorithms creating works indistinguishable from those humans were creating using their own, well, algorithms.
We’re not talking about using expensive tools, things requiring extremely powerful hardware, or only being available to experts. As this video shows all sorts of tools are available to anybody, whether you want to create artwork, video, voiceovers, or music.
Needless to say not everyone is thrilled. This week it was the people who do the voiceovers in video games. They’ve been on strike to protect their jobs, and were not happy with the deal reached.
Prominent voice actors say they weren't told about a landmark deal setting out how voices generated by artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in games.
Many voice actors have suggested this new deal is at odds with the purpose of their industrial action, with Fallout and Mortal Kombat voice actor Sunil Malhotra saying he “sacrificed to strike half of last year to keep my profession alive, not shop around my AI replica”.
Songwriters are also under threat. Although that might mean a boom time for certain political parties who prefer to use songs in their campaigns that imitate an artist, rather than worrying about the copyright.
Last week I saw on the news that the early Mickey Mouse cartoons, Steamboat Willie, were now beyond the period of legal rights being applicable. It’s mind blowing to see what AI is producing 95 years later, compared to primitive animation which used to take thousands of man hours.
To be honest I hadn't realised they'd begun seeding the AI with mind enhancing substances though.
In March the Sony World Photography Awards announced the winning entry in their creative photo category, entitled PSEUDOMNESIA: The Electrician.
But artist, Boris Eldagsen, turned down the award. He had produced the image using DALL-E 2, an artificial intelligence image generator.
Would you have guessed this was produced by a machine?
It’s hard to imagine AI ever writing a really good joke. In my view comedians are our modern day philosophers. But it could undoubtedly come up with the next sausage/hole slip up line from Nicola Willis.
Jokes aside, we shouldn’t lose sight of the incredible things that AI can achieve in much less time than it would take humans.
For example consider online discussions over the use of Electric Vehicles (EVs). Godwin’s law states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Bear in mind that in the past the deterioration of dialogue to the point where people start calling each other Nazis took a lot longer than it does today with our use of technology.
There is a separate law governing discussions on EVs, unlike Godwin’s law the Gobshite’s law states “As discussions on EVs continue, you can guarantee some troll will rock up and start talking about lithium batteries.” Well, AI might be able to help with that.
I don’t mean help with the trolls ranting about battery disposal. Those people should not be engaged with, under any circumstances. If you manage to get them over that first hurdle they’ll inevitably come up with other nonsense. “It’s too quiet, someone will get run over” or “the power cord isn’t long enough” or “I want my broom-broom, I like the smell of the fumes”.
No, AI might actually help with the lithium.
A brand new substance, which could reduce lithium use in batteries, has been discovered using artificial intelligence (AI) and supercomputing…
Microsoft researchers used AI and supercomputers to narrow down 32 million potential inorganic materials to 18 promising candidates in less than a week - a screening process that could have taken more than two decades to carry out using traditional lab research methods.
Executive vice president of Microsoft, Jason Zander, told the BBC one of the tech giant's missions was to “compress 250 years of scientific discovery into the next 25”.
This has always been the real promise of AI, along with other computing advances. The ability of a machine to complete a task vastly more quickly than a human could.
Finding an alternative to lithium, which has growing demand but limited supply, is exciting, dealing with internet trolls is a bonus. But consider the possibility of a similar acceleration in medical research, or in designing the next generation of technology. Which will then develop the next generation of technology, and so on…
For those just starting out in their careers, be it in the creative arts, in scientific research, or in all manner of things, it’s going to be a vastly different world than it is now. The tools and technologies that people have at their disposal are incredible, and will eliminate vast quantities of work that was required from humans.
Which does rather leave the question, what do we need humans for?
If so much of the work, including creative output or scientific research, is conducted by machines will we be unshackled by the demands of monotonous work? Or will the powers that be prefer to keep us in jobs, that could easily be done using technology, rather than give us too much time to think like humans.
In recent newsletters I’ve offered a discount rate for those on low or fixed incomes, students, etc. So if that’s you, for the next couple of days you can sign up to Nick’s Kōrero with 30% off. That’s either $5.59 per month or $59.50 for a whole year.
If that’s not you, but you’d like to subscribe, please use the button below instead for the regular price, or select the option on the right to subscribe for free:
A thought provoking read :)
Exciting news!!