block I am a Political Science student at the California Institute of Technology in San Luis Obispo. Originally from Encinitas.
AI, or artificial intelligence, is really cool and scary. It’s not as scary as “Terminator”, but because AI is increasingly replicating what we usually define as “human”. A few years ago, generating text and images almost instantly seemed impossible. Social media is inundated with posts introducing ChatGPT and Dall•E 2 today. As someone who grew up in the digital age, I have to imagine this feeling akin to his early Google and similar search engines. But I believe the impact of advanced AI and machine learning will have far greater implications for our society. Consider his three areas of interest to me: entertainment, education, and elections.
“The use of AI in the entertainment industry has the potential to bring about both positive and negative change. It can provide inspiration and ideas for stories and characters, but it also has the potential to use AI to generate a lot of low-quality content with minimal effort.Train AI algorithms to improve content quality. You can create content that is designed to get as much attention as possible, regardless of whether it is high-value or not.One of the concerns is that AI can be used to create content without consent based on the work of artists and filmmakers. It’s about being able to create content, which can raise ethical and copyright issues.”
But who wants to read AI-generated content?
I hate to break it on you, but the quote above was written by ChatGPT. was just to do. This does not imply that humans will lose their place in the creation of entertainment. Works with more emotion and contextual analysis will be safe for some time. It could be done entirely through language models.
If search engines made it easy for students to cheat, ChatGPT basically hands out cooked answers on a platter to students. It spits out well-crafted and detailed answers, answering any question I’ve ever thought to ask (including some from the old quizzes I had access to). But accuracy is her ChatGPT’s biggest limitation for students at the moment. This usually manifests itself as incomplete, outdated, and sometimes simply false information. There is no easy test to see if a text is AI-generated at scale, so graders have to rely on this. Yes, tools exist, but they can be fooled (especially with a mix of human and machine-generated content) and are not efficient to use for hundreds of challenges.
In fact, we believe teachers all over the world are subconsciously reviewing answers to machine-generated questions.
While this may seem like a hindrance to education, remember that AI can also be a great tool for learning. Informed chatbots can act as personal experts that students can consult. Try it yourself: Ask ChatGPT question after question about your niche topic. It’s not perfect, but it has enough potential to fundamentally change the way you learn.
Elections are already complex enough that predicting the impact of AI here is a bit more difficult. Still, it’s easy to imagine that a well-funded nationwide campaign could leverage AI. Candidate-modeled chatbots that can provide instant, curated, and dynamic answers to voter questions can dramatically change voter outreach. Humans will likely continue to play a role in building connections over the phone and in person, but AI can work faster and perhaps more persuasively than humans. Even though voters know they are talking to a bot, they may find it more appealing if they feel like they are talking to the candidate personally.
Conversely, negative fake interactions can proliferate. Social media is already facing a problem with bots, and this problem could get worse as bots better imitate humans. What if thousands of accounts could be directed to share the same sentiment (positive or negative) about a candidate, but they were indistinguishable from the real person? bots with will continue to proliferate in both quality and quantity. Methods of uncovering deepfakes may evolve with it, but by the time they are called out, the damage may already have been done.
The world of AI is exciting and scary. New tools open countless doors to reach heights we thought were impossible, but they also have the potential to close doors we thought were safe. My prediction above is just a guess, but I can say it with 100% certainty. AI technology will advance rapidly in the next few years, forcing society to adapt. I sincerely hope that it opens more doors than it closes in the process.
