What Are We Gonna Do With AI?
I wanted to write something for a long time. Nowadays, we hear the term AI everywhere, literally everywhere, from browsers to operating systems, from coffee machines to vacuum cleaners. Is this a hype? - Maybe. But one thing is certain, in my opinion. It is not the same as NFT hype.
What was the NFT hype?
NFT, the tokens, were extremely popular, just 3-4 years ago. People were literally drawing anything and they were trying to mint them. The problem was, since the value was uncertain, people were trying everything to make it a product. There was blockchain also, actually the whole structure of NFT was based on it. You might have heard about crypto, NFT, blockchain. Yes, they were all connected. By the way, I am saying "was", "were", because now it is not that popular and people are fully turned into AI. Actually they gave themselves to AI.
Is AI a hype?
I think there is not a "yes or no" answer for this question. Definitely there is a hype, because actually, this time, AI achieved so many big things that we can easily start a startup company in a week. We can launch a SaSS application in a couple of days. But we need to stop and think a little. Now, AI is doing everything. Then as humans where are we in the middle of this whole process. If AI can do anything, then do we need to do anything at all? I think there is a danger incoming if we are not careful. I am a Software Engineer myself, and honestly I am afraid that we are going to lose our technical abilities day by day, even lose our thinking process. We can argue that whether it is a hype or not, but the important thing is we need to think how much dependent we are on AI. And since people like to use AI, even they might not know the technical background, all the vendors around use AI word in their product to show it more powerful, more efficient.
Remember Deepfake?
Since on social media (especially Instagram), maybe 40% of the videos are now AI made. How are we going to understand what the reality is? Which video is AI-made, and which video is actually real? I think there should be really good regulations to detect these and tell people this is actually AI or real. Already deepfake technology (mimicking someone doing something) was very very harmful, now with AI, we can generate nearly anything.
What about our environment?
Our environment is also affected greatly not just because we are building large warehouses, cutting trees, using water resources, we are also affecting humanity. You might say "are you serious?", but I think yes, unfortunately, our communication and researching skills are also fading each day.
Future of AI
I think, in the near future, in addition of AI being more powerful and more smart, and it might be more dangerous, more harmful. "Harmful" in this context does not mean robots will come and harm us, etc. Since, the laws and regulations are not catching up, and since the AI is being publicly used by everyone (as you can imagine) many scenarios can come up, even the ones affecting mental or physical health.
Am I against AI?
No, definitely not. I use AI, mostly in my personal projects. I like AI's assistance and I need to confess, it helped me a lot in many things. But, what I like to do is, using AI mostly in "ask" mode, instead of "agent" mode, and I am fully supporting this since I like full-control on my source code.
Conclusion
My recommendations are:
- We need more laws and regulations.
- We might need to verify and validate more.
- We need to be AI-independent, we should use it as an assistance.
- We need to use it for more good deeds.
- We need to be careful with our earth, our environment.