My use of AI so far has been pretty much limited to recipes. It cuts through the work of a lot of excessively chatty food bloggers, and gets straight to the simplest version of whatever it is you want to make. You can ask it for variations, too (what if I want to oven-bake that souvlaki instead of grilling it?), which is very helpful. Yet I also feel guilty about helping to put the earnest and enthusiastic bloggers out of business.
Mine is among the less weighty problems facing AI ethics, a subject I was glad to see Robert J. Marks addressing on a new episode of The Science Dilemma with the personable YouTuber Allan CP. Dr. Marks’s bottom line for the program’s mostly younger audience is that AI algorithms can never reproduce human creativity, being comfortable using AI is imperative, the threat to employment will likely be solved through the creativity of capitalism (I hope he’s right), and overall there’s no going back: the AI genie is already out of the bottle, for better or worse.
Admittedly, I tend to think it’s for the worse. Why? The other night I watched the movie Her, about a man (Joaquin Phoenix) in a dystopian future Los Angeles who has a romantic relationship with an operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Things like that — that’s why.