OPINION: When the National Party admitted using AI to generate fake images of nurses, robbers and crime victims in election campaign material, there was an uproar.
A year later, when its Minister for Digitising Government Judith Collins suggested using AI to tutor children, analyse breast screening results and process Official Information Act requests, there was only a flicker of interest.
That an AI would be drafting early versions of a minister’s speeches - it lacks her pizazz and humour, Collins told me in a recent RNZ interview - would have been a cameo line in a sci-fi script a few years ago.
Collins, an AI optimist thrilled at the potential productivity gains, sees little point in regulating the technology.
“It’s like trying to stop the wind blowing. It’s already here and it’s going to keep going,” she said. “I think we just need to stop being so frightened and actually understand that there are enormous benefits.”
But she should be careful what she wishes for. In this industrial revolution, the machines are coming for the elite.
You might think that after our experiment with social media - which Jonathan Haidt in his new book The Anxious Generation blames for an epidemic of teenage mental illness - we might be a little less sanguine.
This time we can’t say we weren’t warned.
The Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, who left Google to speak freely about the risks of AI, believes it presents an existential threat. “They may well develop the goal of taking control – and if they do that, we’re in trouble.”
In his book Scary Smart, Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer of Google X, predicts that by 2049 AI will be a billion times smarter than the smartest human, a gap similar to that between a fly and Albert Einstein. How, he asks, do you stop the superbeing from squashing the fly?
We’re at a weird juncture in the public conversation on AI when those who helped develop the technology - Hinton and Gawdat are just two of them - are ringing alarm bells and yet most of us think we know better.
Most people I talk to about AI don’t believe it’s doing much more than industrial scale predictive text.
The European Union is taking it seriously. In March, it passed a law regulating AI.
Interestingly, using AI in the healthcare and education settings, as Collins proposes, would be deemed high risk in the EU and require strong transparency and human oversight.
Other uses, such as scrapping CCTV and internet images to create biometric data bases and using AI to manipulate or prey on human vulnerabilities, is banned outright under the EU law.
Personally, I am excited about the potential of AI and in awe of what it can already do.
I gasped when I saw OpenAI’s Sora create visual worlds from a text prompt. What would that do to our film industry?
American actor and film-maker Tyler Perry put plans for a $800 million Atlanta studio on hold when he saw what Sora could do.
Check it out and ask yourself whether you still expect the same number of film-makers to use New Zealand locations at vast cost.
I recently spent a rainy afternoon chatting with the AI chatbot Claude about narrative nonfiction journalism.
The quality of writing and sharpness of observation, spat out in seconds, was astounding but this is not what many of us expected from our overlords.
“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes,” writer Joanna Maciejewska opined on X.
We thought the robots would take manual jobs but AI is coming for the creatives. It’s coming for the elite. It’s coming for the decision-makers too: the CEOs and perhaps the politicians themselves.
A poll by the online course provider edX found 49% of CEOs believed most of their roles could be replaced by AI.
Some already have. The Chinese-based online gaming company NetDragon Websoft appointed an AI (named Tang Yu) as its CEO.
The market seemed to approve as the value of its stock grew. A Polish drinks company also appointed an AI (named Mika) to the top job.
In Brazil, a lawmaker Ramiro Rosário, sick of corruption and government inefficiency, passed a law written by ChatGPT. It was a mundane law (preventing water companies charging residents for stolen metres) but a milestone worth marking.
In Denmark, the Synthetic Party is “the world’s first political party driven by AI”.
We already trust AI with autonomous vehicles, detecting fraud and medical diagnosis.
Why wouldn’t it be unleashed to solve our intractable public policy problems and write up the press release (Collins could add the humour and the pizazz).
