AI is Redefining Real

No AI’s have been used in the creation of this post. Of course, you can’t really be sure of that. You just have to take my word for it.

If it seems like I’m obsessed with AI at the moment, trust your instincts. It’s a worthy topic because the universe just changed. Last week I gave you a small taste of the tools available. This week we need to consider the implications of the tools. We can start with this image of random people below. And they all have one thing in common. See if you can guess what that is?

None of these people actually exist. They are computer generated photos of imagined people. Well, at least that’s what www.thispersondoesnotexist.com will have me believe. For all I know they took a phone to a BBQ and took some happy snaps.

And that’s one of the key issues we’ll face in the next few years. Knowing if something is real or AI generated. Just think of all the synthetic versions of reality we can already create. Voices, videos, pictures, in fact anything we can create a digital version of, we can now create a fake version of. And it has no noticeable difference. Within a decade we’ll be able to buy soft robots of ourselves. Which look and sound exactly like us. In fact, this has already happened. Hiroshi Ishiguro is a roboticist who makes life like robots, including one of himself.

We may need an entirely new definition of what is real.

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So what should real mean? The original. There is only one. The first. Organic. Not made by machine of software. There is no substitute. Found in nature. Not an imitation. Not made in a factory. All natural ingredients… And who gets to decide?

Or maybe, it’s natural that AI has arrived, because it was created by biological beings. It might just be just a fork in the inevitable evolutionary path we must follow. I’m not exactly sure.

But here is what I know for sure. The only way we’ll be able to tell if something is real of ‘fake’ – is if we are forced to outline it legally. It’s time for law makers to get busy, fast. And while I’m very positive about what emergent AI’s can do to help humanity, I also think humanity deserves to know when they are interacting with each other, or something other.

Keep Thinking,

Steve.