If AI introduces errors, Strong said, it defeats its purpose as a time-saving device.
“The whole reason we started using AI to sift through lots of data and examples and all of this and look for patterns and pattern matching is because we, as humans, are not fabulous at that. And so now we’re putting ourselves in a position where we’ve come full circle and we’re having to take all this stuff and start looking through it,” Strong said.
Such hallucinations can be damaging to personal reputations, Strong said, pointing to the example of law professor Jonathan Turley.
In 2023, Turley’s name appeared when ChatGPT was asked to create a list of legal scholars who had sexually assaulted someone. His name came up simply because he had taught classes about sexual discrimination and sexual assault.
Strong said Turley “now is associated with those words, appears to be accused by AI of committing these crimes, and cannot seem to extract himself from that,” Strong said. “Yeah, I think truth matters.”
She added that it is hard to correct AI’s mistakes, because “AI is not a simple database.”
“If we decide to delete something that’s not true after it’s gone through this machine learning process, you can’t really do that. Microsoft Research spent seven months last year trying to see if it could help a model forget something, and it couldn’t figure out how,” Strong said.
AI girlfriends
When asked about any concerns he may have about AI, Stokes, the AI engineer, said he worries some people might “forsake human connection for a kind of world of their own construction,” perhaps with an “AI girlfriend in VR.”
“I think some people will isolate, and some people’s minds will kind of bifurcate and leave the collective,” he said.
Others, he said, “will try and maintain real connections and relationships, and in some cases, maybe use some gen AI to augment those.”
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He explained that AI can be used, alternatively, to bring people together.
“I mean, the promises for translation and for other kinds of work. There’s a story that you can tell about gen AI, where it maximizes communication bandwidth. Like, people whose language is maybe awkward, who are bad at putting together linguistic constructs, can sort of get their ideas through with generative AI. And so it can be a communication aid,” he said.
“But I worry about it maybe becoming like an obsession or an end in itself, a way that people escape and grow further apart,” Stokes said.
Standing up to AI: screenwriters’ strike
It’s not inevitable that AI will take humans entirely out of the creative process, Strong said.
While AI is currently being used to “write the first draft of everything,” she notes that we saw resistance to it with the 2023 screenwriters’ strike in Hollywood.