Tarter Source

Time magazine crowned Taylor Swift as its Person of the Year but, while she may have packed ballparks and theaters, 2023 belonged to a non-human, artificial intelligence.

“This was the year—ask your stockbroker, or the disgraced management of Sports Illustrated—that artificial intelligence went from a dreamy projection to an ambient menace and perpetual sales pitch,” noted Jason Farago in the New York Times on the last day of 2023.

“I remain profoundly relaxed about machines passing themselves off as humans, they are terrible at it. Humans acting like machines—that is a much likelier peril, and one that culture, as the supposed guardian of (human?) virtues and values, has failed to combat these past few years,” Farago stated.

That wasn’t the only article about A.I. in the Times that day. Vauhini Vara didn’t appear to be “profoundly relaxed” in a story headlined, “One year in and ChatGPT already has us doing its bidding.”

“The truth is that no matter what I asked ChatGPT, in my early attempts to confound it, OpenAI came out ahead. Engineers had designed it to learn from its encounters with users. And regardless of whether its answers were good, they drew back to engage with it again and again. A major goal of OpenAI’s, in this first year, has been to get people to use it. In pursuing my power games, then, I’ve done nothing but help it along,” wrote Vara.

The buzz about A.I. in 2023 was everywhere: from lavish come-ons on LinkedIn, inviting eager marketers to ride the A.I. success train, to editorial cartoons depicting A.I. as a giant automaton poised to obliterate. Headlines screamed “We Need Smart Intellectual Property Laws for Artificial Intelligence,” “Yes, AI Models Can Get Worse over Time” and “Why We Need to See Inside AI’s Black Box.”

From a business point of view, A.I. flew to the top of the charts with billions invested in its development. The year 2023 marked a move by venture capitalists from cryptocurrency to A.I., according to one report.

So was this just good business, the application of the latest technology? Maybe tensions will fade like the autonomous vehicle movement that only a few years ago was looming in the rearview mirror but now appears to have moved to the slow lane. Or is this real-life sci-fi: the machine you can’t turn off?

I turned to Scientific American for answers. In an August 2023 issue, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna offered this: “Because the term ‘AI’ is ambiguous, it makes having clear discussions more difficult. In one sense, it is the name of a subfield of computer science. In another, it can refer to the computing techniques developed in that subfield, most of which are now focused on pattern matching based on large data sets and the generation of new media based on those patterns. Finally, in marketing copy and startup pitch desks, the term ‘AI’ serves as magic fairy dust that will supercharge your business.”

Bender and Hanna also noted that “too many AI publications come from corporate labs or from academic groups that receive disproportionate industry funding.”

One thing about A.I. remains clear: it’s powerful. “Today’s most advanced (A.I.) models—also known as ‘frontier’ models—use 5 billion times the computing power of cutting-edge models from a decade ago. Processing that once took weeks now happens in seconds. No technology this powerful has become so accessible, so widely, so quickly,” state Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman in an article entitled “The AI Power Paradox” in an issue of Foreign Affairs published last year.

Every industry seems to now have an A.I. problem or opportunity. “The arrival of Amazon reshaped the retail landscape for books. The rise of e-books threatened the printed word. And the boom in self-publishing gave writers a path to success that left out traditional publishing houses. Each time, the book business was able to adapt,” wrote Elizabeth Harris and Alexandra Alter in the New York Times last summer.

“Now publishing is facing a new disruption that is likely to be far more wide-ranging and transformative: the rise of artificial intelligence, technology that has the potential to reshape nearly every aspect of the work that goes into producing a book—even the act of writing, itself,” stated Harris and Alta.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, calls A.I. “a juggernaut.” “There are no virtually no checks on the power of generative AI models, but there is broad consensus among corporations, governments, and civil society that guardrails are needed,” she said.

Regarding those guardrails, Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, focused on President Biden’s 2023 executive order regarding A.I.: “Mr. Biden’s executive order outdoes even the Europeans in considering just about every potential risk one could imagine, from everyday fraud to the development of weapons of mass destruction…In devoting so much effort to the issue of A.I., the White House is rightly determined to avoid the disastrous failure to meaningfully regulate social media in the 2010s. With government sitting on the sidelines, social media technology evolved from a seemingly innocent tool for sharing personal updates among friends to a large-scale psychological manipulation, complete with a privacy-invasive business model and a disturbing record of harming teenagers, fostering misinformation, and facilitating the spread of propaganda.”

Wu’s concern over state regulation of A.I. is just as confusing and ambiguous as the technology, itself: “The state should proceed cautiously in the absence of harm, but it also has a duty, given evidence of harm, to take action. By that measure, with A.I. we are at risk of doing too much and too little at the same time.”

There’s no shortage of A.I. success stories. Wired magazine ran a story last year headlined “AI Is Building Highly Effective Antibodies That Humans Can’t Even Imagine.” “Robots, computers, and algorithms are hunting for potential new therapies in ways humans can’t—by processing huge volumes of data and building previously unimagined molecules,” the magazine stated.

The Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Center declared “We’re using artificial intelligence for more precise breast cancer diagnoses” in one of their ads.

General Mills said that A.I. helps the company analyze purchase data. The Associated Press also uses A.I. technologies in its dissemination of the news.

A.I. is always making news these days. The New York Times filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court on Dec. 27, 2023. “It’s a doozie, one many think will be precedent-setting,” gushed Jeremy Kahn, the A.I. editor at Fortune magazine.

While the Times may object to companies scraping its content for A.I., the paper isn’t immune to using the technology’s benefits, employing A.I. for content recommendation to readers.

Vauhini Vara cautions against making light of A.I.’s publicized mistakes. “Today, when the technology is in its infancy, that power seems novel, even funny. Tomorrow, it might not.”