Maybe AI Will Get Us Over the Hump?

You know who's stupid? I am.

Just yesterday, I read the story: OpenAI Insiders Warn of a 'Reckless' Race for Dominance

In the last week, I have published two AI generated images that I absolutely loved in the articles:

See You in Hell

Me vs. My Own Blog???

You know how I generated those images? Through Wix. Who provided Wix with their Tools?

OpenAI. According to the New York Times, there's a 70% chance that AI will "destroy or catastrophically harm humanity."

Did I stop using AI immediately? Nope. Going to hum a song to myself and make some more images:

Urban Decay

Desolation, Unpopulated

Desk Drawer with Assorted Junk

Rusted Girders

Soldier in Mud Trench

Storm of Blood

Forest Through the Trees

Monsoon Marathon

Abandoned Midwest Factory with Debris

Dodgeball Anarchy

Beacon of Speech co-founder Ted looked at a few images and said he's concerned about me and my overtly dark themes.

Really?

Am I helping to drive man's own extinction?

That actually sounds like something I'd accidentally do.

But seriously though, a year ago, AI was still an unknown to the public. In a matter of a year, AI is everywhere. Clunky and mistake-prone, you can't have good AI until you start with the crappy AI. None of those pictures above were generated on the first try. Again, we do not use AI for anything except for images on this website. What's the point, specifically today? When the internet came, doomsayers said humanity would be changed forever. It was, in both good and bad ways. When Y2K came, doomsayers said humanity would collapse. It did not. So, as we stand at the next evolutionary gate, readying to enter the AI Era, there is real trepidation between the unknown and...

You know what? We're a pretty pessimistic lot here at Beacon of Speech. A month before I was born in August of 1969, man landed on the moon. Since then, mankind, as a whole, has kind of plateaued.

Maybe AI is the nudge that will bring the great human advances like a cure for cancer and the colonization of other planets.

Maybe.

Or maybe the Earth will turn into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But part of me thinks that we would have deserved it, seeing that AI learns from the past and builds on it.

Technically AI would learn about killing humans from all the humans we've killed.

And if AI does destroy the planet, who's to say we wouldn't have destroyed the planet anyhow? AI would just do it in a faster and more efficient way.

<sigh>

Side Note: The working title was Beacon of Speech: Conceptual Artists: Part IV