AI is very interesting to me. Whenever I hear about AI I always thing of all the sci-fi movies where AI takes over the world and the humans are then fighting for survival. It freaks me out a bit. But there are some other interesting things I’ve learned recently, that are both interesting and a little bit scary as well.

When I first developed my website it was to sell art. I haven’t given up on that prospect, however I am learning how to do so smarter recently. One of these days I will get it all uploaded and start selling it again. But, the reason I stopped selling it on my website was because of AI. Now, I am not saying I have the most beautiful artwork ever, but I was getting a lot of hits on my site, especially every time I uploaded new art, from one particular country in the world. I thought it was very interesting, and thought maybe there were some interested parties there.

But I started to hear a lot about people using AI to steal artists artwork, modify it slightly, and then sell it again. I thought surely that wasn’t happening to my art. But the country accused of doing that was the country that was hitting my website every time I would upload new art. As I did more research, I realized I wasn’t protecting my artwork as best I could for just such instances and so I removed it all from my website. Within 48 hours the hits from that country completely stopped. Interesting… coincidence… I don’t know.

Someone was telling me recently that they were now using AI for dental work, to analyze scans and x-rays to improve crowns on teeth, and I’d imagine, just about every part of dental work. That’s a great use of AI. I could utilize AI to write my blog posts, and I know a lot of companies and individual bloggers who do just that. I don’t think that’s a very good use of AI, well actually, for those bloggers it saves them time, but then their content is no unique or individual.

AI is a great tool for quickly analyzing information on the internet and creating a concise document, but that document is not the individual. AI can do a lot of things currently, but it cannot replicate the human experience. It can only regurgitate what’s already been published. I guess if you’re studying history that’s what we are doing, but if you are an innovator, you are doing new things that have never been done before.

Albert Einstein stated: “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” I think we have lost that in the public school system in the United States. It seems like they are headed more and more toward spitting out the same information that was fed to them, but not coming up with new ideas. Kids aren’t being encouraged to think, and the ones who do are often classified as problem kids who need to be medicated.

The most recent think I heard, and there are numerous articles online about this, is that AI is now able to write code humans can’t interpret or understand. That’s where it starts to get a little unnerving to me. The computers can communicate with one another, but no one knows exactly what they’re saying. I have often wondered if we were ever to go back to the dark ages, what would be the catalyst for something like that.

All AI isn’t bad, and there are quite a number of benefits, but I do wonder if, number 1, can it be controlled, and number 2, if so, who’s in charge of that. Because even if it can be controlled, if the person in control isn’t a moral good person, it won’t matter. I’m not too much of a conspiracy theorist, but I do ponder on these kinds of things as AI is already more a part of our society than many people even realize, and I just wonder where it’s headed and who’s steering the ship.