Few technological advancements have captured minds and cultivated fears as fiercely as artificial intelligence (AI). It is portrayed in countless variants of pop culture art, such as J.A.R.V.I.S from Marvel’s “Iron Man” to the rogue NS-5 from the film “I, Robot.” Some people view AI as the future of convenience and efficiency while others view it as humanity’s descent into self-destruction.
I believe AI is so intimidating because of its feasibility. For many years, sophisticated AI was simply a figment of our imaginations, rendered impossible due to a lack of computing power. Today, however, computing power is no longer an issue; AI technology has vastly improved. Over the last decade, AI has made significant advancements in its ability to understand and process natural language. This has led to the development of more advanced virtual assistants and improved language translation services. Additionally, advances in machine learning have allowed AI to perform tasks such as image and speech recognition with greater accuracy. Don’t believe me? What if I told you that the last three sentences you just read were generated entirely by AI in fifteen seconds! AI has reached the point where the product it generates resembles human speech, becoming indistinguishable from genuine human writing.
This technology has the potential to break the internet. Imagine you launch a program or visit a website and can have AI create a virtual portrait of yourself, formulate a detailed example to any question you have, write beautiful poetry and help you write a love letter to your girlfriend. These applications are all available today for free and barely scratch the surface of what this technology is capable of. For more examples, the famous tech creator MKBHD released a great video entitled, “The truth about AI getting ‘creative.’” This video covers the program I used to create those earlier sentences and a few other notable AI programs and their impact. Theoretically, if AI can formulate an answer to any question by using the entire internet to validate its information, many websites would cease to serve any significant purpose. This is how AI is/could soon be “breaking the internet.”
All things considered, there are three reasons why I believe AI won’t break the internet. The first is e-commerce. The listing and purchasing of items on the internet has become a significant part of how we interact with goods and services today. Within that process is an intrinsic human aspect that I don’t think AI can replace. The second reason is copyright. Since these AI programs are pulling from various sources across the web, the issue of copyright must be addressed. I believe this will end with significant regulation on these AI programs and more paywalls across the internet to protect company copyright information. The last reason is that human curiosity and creativity cannot be contained. Just as people had the creativity to create the programs, there will be those who choose to operate outside the potentially dominant form of artificial intelligence. However, until the day dominant AI fails, and ceases to exist, embrace reality. We must do so because AI is causing the line between reality and fiction to grow closer and closer together.
