The Dark Side of AI: A Dangerous Arms Race

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Corporate Landscape of AI
3. The Rise of Chat GPT
4. The AI Arms Race
5. The Danger of Generative AI
6. The Deepfake Inflection Point
7. The Problem with AI Search Engines
8. The Biased Responses of AI Systems
9. The Nightmare Scenario
10. Conclusion

The Rise of AI and the Danger of Generative AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a buzzword in recent years, with many companies investing billions of dollars in research and development. The corporate landscape of AI has gone from being a veritable black box of total secrecy to a cold war-style arms race between a number of different technology companies commanding over six trillion dollars of economic power. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, OpenAI, and Amazon are just a few of the sizable players in the field. Nearly every major technology company on Earth is looking for applications and attempting to develop their own proprietary tech, ranging in purpose from feed curation to content ad serving to healthcare.

One of the most popular AI technologies right now is chat GPT, a chatbot that uses machine learning to generate human-like responses to text Prompts. Chat GPT has become a household name in AI Chatbot technology, but it certainly isn't alone in that regard. After its explosive debut and subsequent 30 billion dollar potential valuation, the public-facing launch of chat GPT kicked off a corporate arms race between a number of substantially powerful social media and technology companies, primarily Google and Microsoft.

The AI Arms Race

Google has spent roughly four billion dollars on proprietary AI technology fueled by the nearly insurmountable data that they are able to Collect from web searches and YouTube traffic. Meanwhile, Microsoft has begun pouring billions of dollars into their own version of an AI search engine Based on Bing, which apparently might be codenamed Sydney. Both companies are racing to get their own versions of an AI chatbot perfected and implemented into a search engine while gauging against each other how fast to move. Neither company wants to be last, in fact, they're dead set against it, pushing them into an all-out race.

This kind of competitive cycle can be seen all over the tech industry, but using a piece of technology that comes with unavoidable and horrifying downside societal risks is a whole different ball game. Our ability to Create fictitious images, audio, and video has Never been more advanced than it is today. All the while, leaving us with a dwindling ability to even decipher what is real and what is fake. Children are in school generating their homework with AI language tools, failing to learn even basic skill sets. Now they are working on counter tools to be able to take a block of text and identify whether or not it was created by AI chatbot technology, but right now, that only has a one out of six positive hit rate, which means that they've created the tech to generate stuff without being able to identify what was generated by that technology.

The Deepfake Inflection Point

Generative AI is rapidly becoming capable of producing photorealistic content simply from a few words. Voice and audio generative AI is already capable of producing highly similar, nearly indistinguishable audio, which can even be modeled after actual people if there's enough training data. Combine this with a now mainstream ability to purchase falsified metrics on social media, such as bot traffic and other boosted engagement, and You arrive at what seems like a nightmare scenario in which what you see, right down to the very people in your voice calls and video chats, may not be real.

The Problem with AI Search Engines

The long-standing avenue for people to Seek information, online search portals like Google or Bing, is subjected to a whole new layer of falsified and factually incorrect responses that are highly biased based on their trading data from all sorts of different sources and language bots that we really just don't understand. These chatbots are very clearly starting to muddy the waters. The information you get from the neural network AI search functions might be and probably is to a degree flat out wrong or deeply biased, and all of it continuing to spiral deeper and deeper into a chasm of uncertainty because massive corporations are locked in a technological battle for supremacy of an emerging market that we really truly should be more careful about pursuing.

The Nightmare Scenario

We Are on a razor's edge where careless advancement could result in a widespread schism between fact and fiction. We already grapple with misinformation on a daily basis in our society, so think about how much worse it could get. People will be able to impersonate voices, faces, photographs, and videos all at the same time easily with the touch of a button. The ability to create is rapidly outpacing our ability to decipher what is true and what is not or where it comes from. That's already a problem, but it's about to get a whole hell of a lot worse.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the AI arms race is a dangerous game that we as a society are not ready to play. The rise of generative AI and deepfake technology has the potential to cause widespread chaos and confusion, leaving us unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. The biased responses of AI systems and the problem with AI search engines only add to the problem. It's time for us to stop and rethink this before it's too late.