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Love it or loathe it, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay – and it’s getting harder to ignore. From how we generate and consume content to how industries operate and innovate, AI is reshaping the world around us. It’s making waves across sectors from media to science, transforming not just the headlines, but the way we live and work.
Each month, our ‘AI Digest’ breaks down the biggest stories in AI, exploring their broader impact on brands, industries, and everyday life.
A toll to pay
First up, concerns have emerged this month around the mental toll that heavy use of AI may be having on those who rely on it. Microsoft head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, pointed to what he termed ‘AI psychosis,’ a non-clinical term describing incidents where people increasingly rely on AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and become convinced something imaginary has become real.
According to the BBC, examples of this phenomenon include “believing they have unlocked a secret aspect of the tool, or forming a romantic relationship with it, or coming to the conclusion that they have god-like superpowers”. So, nothing to worry about there then.
Elsewhere, Charlie Warzel reflects the sentiment, saying “many things in this AI moment are difficult to process”. Writing in the Atlantic, he argues we are currently “swimming in the primordial soup of machine cognition” with little oversight on how these new tools are being used. How will we react if the value of labour falls with the arrival of a new Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), he asks, while suggesting Generative AI tools are transformative, insomuch as their adoption has already radically altered the economy and the digital world.
There can be no doubt that things continue to change – and quickly. It’s incumbent upon all of us, as users of this new technology, in the communications space and elsewhere, to remain vigilant to its costs as well as its undoubted benefits.
End of the beginning…
On the other side of the coin, no lesser figure than Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, is apparently scaling back his AI ambitions, at least a little, right now. According to the Financial Times, a billion-dollar hiring process at Meta has been paused, while the New York Times followed up with suggestions the “superintelligence” unit at the tech leader may be downgraded.
Meta, perhaps expectedly, dismissed the freeze as “basic organisational planning” and said it was “creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises”.
Nonetheless, there is a growing section of the commentariat that suggests we may be coming toward the end of the first phase of the hype-cycle around AI and that we should brace for a crash before the golden age. John Thornhill argues “a bone-juddering crash — or several crashes,” may be just around the corner as too rapid an expansion of data centre capacity outpaces demand.
Concerns were heightened by a report from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) earlier this month, which found the vast majority of businesses that have so far spent big in this area were getting zero return from their investments.
Thornhill and others argue, though, that any winter chill will eventually lead to a prosperous spring, with investment now paying dividends in the longer-term. The question, however, is which of today’s leading AI providers will be left standing to reap the rewards?
Real benefits – here and now
Finally, in unambiguously good news, researchers in the United States have revealed AI has invented two new antibiotics that have the potential to kill drug-resistant gonorrhoea and MRSA. The new drugs were designed atom-by-atom by the technology and killed the superbugs in laboratory and animal tests. However, the two new compounds still need years of refinement and clinical trials before they could be prescribed, according to the BBC.
Despite the sometimes-challenging backdrop to the roll-out of AI, there can be no doubt of its huge potential – and this is just one small demonstration.
In a similar vein, motor neurone disease (MND) patient Sarah Ezekiel has seen her voice returned to her after a new AI tool recreated it from just eight seconds of audio on a VHS tape. Bristol-based assistive technology company, Smartbox, is now looking to provide free voice-cloning to one million people at risk of losing their speech, through conditions including MND, cancer or stroke.
A lot to digest over the supposedly quieter summer months – join Fire on the Hill in September to see what comes next.
Image: Wengang Zhai / Unsplash
