Written by Fola Yahaya
Arianna Huffington co-authored a piece in TIME last week on a sinister-sounding plan to roll out something called ‘AI-driven behaviour change‘. The article is a glorified puff piece for Thrive.ai, Huffington’s new healthcare start-up (backed of course by Sam Altman) that is trying to make a fortune by ‘nudging’ us to look after ourselves.
The thinking is that people get chronically ill not because of their genes, but because they are fundamentally lazy and/or stupid and can’t control their impulses. In the article, they point to the fact that a staggering 129 million Americans have at least one major and treatable chronic disease which costs $4.1 trillion annually to treat.
The solution? A personalised AI coach that goads people into doing the right thing. Thrive wants to use AI to gather then assess data on how we sleep, eat, move and deal with stress, and then serve up daily nudges or microsteps to move you in the right direction. This is clearly part of a wider trend to allow AI to know us better than we know ourselves, and then algorithmically nudge us into doing better. Bruce Schneier wrote a great article on where this is all headed.
AI assistants will serve as your advocate with others, and as a butler for you. This requires an intimacy greater than your search engine, email provider, cloud storage system or phone. You’re going to want it with you 24/7, constantly training on everything you do. You will want it to know everything about you, so it can most effectively work on your behalf.
This should worry the hell out of you. Algorithms already shape how you are entertained and informed, who you vote for, how much you pay to keep yourself safe and healthy, and increasingly how you feel about yourself when you browse social media. Extending AI to the physical world is just going to amp this up exponentially. Opting out will not be an option.
The problem is that there is lots of thinking about, but way too little action on, managing the inherent risks in entrusting an unthinking and unfeeling bot with ultimately dictating how we work, live and play. Instead, trillions of dollars are being spent on trying to use AI to iron out the behavioural ‘kinks’ that make life worth living. Are we such a bad species that we need AI to fix us?
OpenAI has released its five-level typology of its path to creating systems that are truly smarter than humans. It’s a nice framework for understanding where AI systems currently are and where they are headed.
ChatGPT is currently level 1 – conversational AI chatbots that just respond by predicting the next word in a sentence. What’s freaky is when AI systems get to level 5 (DEFCON 5?), i.e. self-governing and able to ”do the work of an organisation”. There is clearly a sales pitch to justify the trillions of dollars being poured into AI (with currently little return for anyone apart from NVIDIA, which produces the computers that power AI, and OpenAI which sells it). However, what I find scary is that no one seems to care that the goal of a company is to produce something so powerful that it can, well, autonomously run a company, army, government, etc.
Even just as a statement of intent, this is crazy. Imagine Google publishing a strategy paper saying that while it was currently just offering an efficient way for you to find your way (Google Maps), in the not-too-distant future it would be creating a system to manage all the traffic on the roads on those maps!
I’m adding a new “video of the week” section to showcase the breathtaking speed at which generative video is evolving. OpenAI’s Sora, currently only available to a handful of beta testers, still appears to be leading the pack, but Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha (who names these things!) leaps to the top by dint of actually being available right now.
This week, OpenAI released two new videos both with AI-generated soundscapes. Now, we have no idea how long these things took to create, but they claim editing was limited to stitching together multiple prompts; i.e. someone just typed in a few sentences et voilà – a fully-fledged music video in seconds!
Even if we need to take this with a truckload of salt, it means you’ll soon be able to create videos at the drop of a prompt. I’ve been very clear that while this threatens millions of jobs, the world will still need creatives who know how to get the best out of these tools. However, it will inevitably:
The second OpenAI video has even broader implications. Folks, we will never, ever be able to trust archive footage again. The video below, ‘created’ by film-maker Ben Desai, is a really eerie journey through a reimagined past.
Google quietly introduced Vids today, a business-focused AI-powered video creation app for its Workspace suite. I don’t really get it, and the consensus from the YouTube comments (Apple wisely blocks all commenting on its launch videos) was:
My takeaway is that almost all content will be video-driven within months. Audiences just don’t have the time – nor increasingly the attentional bandwidth – for anything more complex than something moving on the screen.
Apps like Vids, Canva, Runway and eventually Sora will be the starting point for visual storytelling, and the race is on to make this as easy and as simple as grunting an idea and instantly seeing the visual output. With such ease of use, creatives who know how to tell a tale and tell it well will still be in demand as diverse audiences seek out original and authentic content.
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