A Different Perspective: 7/17/2024

In the last couple of weeks, the artificial intelligence craze seems to have become part of my life, for better or worse.

On the positive side, a couple of investments in the technology sector are doing very well. On the other hand, it ushers in an era of great uncertainty, blurring reality and even history. This has already occurred in the digital age, in that significant information recorded only electronically gets lost as systems are updated or sites cease to exist.

I find myself getting “site unavailable” messages more and more when I try to call up a bookmarked webpage because it has been pushed aside by a flood of newer sites, abandoned by its creator, or in a format no longer supported.

That was great about the printed word, especially references like encyclopedias. They might be outdated, but the essential information is still there at the time of publication. Newspapers, especially advertising, record events, advancements, and society daily. Not that the news was accurate or without bias, but multiple versions allowed for averaging things out, and the right or wrong details could not be altered later.

We older models were limited to encyclopedias, usually in 20-volume sets, with everything from A to Zygotes. They were often sold door-to-door with a lot of high-pressure salesmanship. “You don’t want your children to be ignorant, don’t you?”

The great thing about those volumes was that printing them was slow and expensive, and a lot of care went into making sure the articles were as accurate as possible. Of course, time and expense were also the greatest drawbacks, as technology and events accelerated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Imagine trying to keep an up-to-date printed reference on electronic devices today.

The internet offers unprecedented access to knowledge but is constantly fluid and never permanent. Anything can be altered by anyone with the skills and motivation to redirect an inquiry. I’m a Wikipedia user who appreciates the input of experts, but I’m also aware that many charlatans and cranks get their input included. In addition, many accepted “facts” are being proven false or at least suspect. Pick any point in time and find out if sugar/coffee/vitamin E, sunshine, water/booze …. are good or bad and in what amounts.

Along comes AI, dazzling people with new abilities, but like a child with their first set of crayons, it is certainly far from an accurate or dependable picture of anything beyond copying what’s already in existence. I don’t pay the big bucks for the most advanced AI programs, but I have explored the offers to try the free versions, like Microsoft Copilot.

They have been very disappointing. They have not come up with anything more than I could easily find for myself or ricocheted off into totally unrelated subjects.

“Is this what you were looking for?” “NOT EVEN #%&;@* CLOSE YOU #%&;@* IDIOT!”

One of my history-based Facebook pages posted a photograph from the 1880s of a vast mountain meadow with 50,000 cords of wood stacked after a winter’s work by the loggers. Immediately, a couple of people jumped on it as AI-created. A couple of years ago, accusations of Photoshopping were common and usually easy to determine. Not so easy with AI. In this case, it was easy to disprove since many had seen copies of the original for decades before AI, PhotoShop, or the Internet.

But as technology advances, and with less physical record-keeping, more and more things will come into question or, worse, work their way from fallacy to accepted fact, with nothing permanent to establish reality. But maybe no one but a few cranks will care.