There are a lot of articles about AI. Some say things such as, AI is great, and we should all use it, however, others are along the lines that AI is going to take over our lives and kill us all. I wrote this article to provide an unbiased view of AI, its future, and whether or not you should use it.
Before continuing you need to know what Artificial Intelligence is. What most people think of as AI are large language models such as chat GPT or Gemini. The term Artificial Intelligence is misleading because computers are not advanced enough, and may never be, to generate true intelligence. What large language models do is take a huge amount of data and use it to simulate intelligence but they have no creativity; they only respond to prompts and use templates.
AI is a tool, everyone knows that, but what exactly can it do? For this article, I will be using the most commonly known Artificial Intelligence Chat GPT. There are many things that Chat GPT is good at. Most prominent among these are research and teaching. Lack of education is a big problem and AI’s like Chat GPT potentially are the solution. With Chat GPT every student gets a personal tutor for free and every teacher gets an assistant to help them make lessons. As far as research goes if you ask the latest version of Chat GPT( GPT 4o), something like “generate a realistic image of 1000 small cats flying through the air over a thunderstorm of red lighting” it will show you what was featured at the top.
Truly this is useful and for more than just making images of cute cats, but what are the dangers of this power? One is faking; with Chat GPT. You can tell it to write an essay about Newton’s 3 laws as though written by an eighth grader and it will give you one that is very convincing. Another one of the dangers of AI is deepfakes. Deepfakes are videos that put one person’s face over another so far if you are looking for it you can tell it’s AI but if you don’t know that this is possible or aren’t looking for it then you could completely believe someone said or did something they didn’t. In addition, at the rate, AI is growing Deep fakes could get more and more convincing until you can’t tell what’s real and what’s a deepfake. You can no longer always trust what you see. One danger that many people think about is not even possible yet most people have seen a sci-fi movie about sentient AI taking over but for reasons previously stated AI isn’t intelligent, and even if it was why would it want to destroy humans?
In conclusion, AI has a lot of potential but that potential is unchecked. Artificial Intelligence is a weapon anyone can use hacking, deepfakes, and faking work can all be done easily with AI. These risks make it dangerous but whether the danger outweighs the possibility is up to you. AI could take human civilization to a whole new level but it could also destroy that civilization making it impossible to trust what you see. In the words of Voltaire “with great power comes great responsibility.”
