As AI has become apparent across school, social media and the internet. The Channels asked two staff writers to discuss is AI helping or hurting the world around us?
Jencie Hickey, Staff Writer
AI has opened the door to so much that didn’t seem possible before.
Not only is AI more abundant in today’s world, but it has also uncovered hidden opportunities every day for people to explore.
Before AI art, art had limits to only what a human could imagine. Now it has spread to what AI can scavenge up. Even the craziest scenarios that a human couldn’t even fathom AI can create with one word.
That is not the limit of what AI can do. It can help people come up with new ideas for their work or ways to improve it. AI can even give the artist a list of recommendations to help their art blossom into something even more amazing than it was before.
The reach of AI doesn’t stop there; it has no limits to what it can provide for the world. Not only does it help grow the creativity for the world, but it also serves as a tool in all things organization. With just one sentence AI can put together a week of groceries for a busy student or it can generate a variety of workouts for a first-time gym member.
AI takes those time-consuming tasks and comes up with lists in mere seconds.
Before AI, people had to spend hours upon hours making lists or coming up with any bit of inspiration for a new school project or trying to break down a math equation.
Now with AI, all of those things are much more attainable. So the next time you need a list, some inspiration or a gym workout, AI will have the results in seconds.
Noah Manzarek-Naghi, News Editor
The theory of postmodernism shapes our perception of the world by a boundary.
First, there is ordinary reality, where everything is quantifiable, letting us ground ourselves in a state of being that is comfortable and certain.
With the current material and cultural landscape comes a deluge of media, crossbreeding itself and forming new grotesque cartoons of trends previously tread–this is the other side of the boundary, called hyperreality.
Hyperreality is built from “simulacra”. A copy of concepts once familiar, now rendered completely unrecognizable from their original forms by the perversion of the media flood.
What is the first thing one thinks of when they read the word “princess” for example? They may think of a Disney princess with a gown and a perfect face. One’s mind probably doesn’t go to a princess as a very real political title that still exists in the modern day.
AI, or more accurately, large language models (LLMs), thrive on hyperreality. Their sole purpose is to pollute the human media with as much useless information as possible.
Recently, LLM company Particle6 introduced “Tilly Norwood” as the world’s first AI actress. Its inclusion in the Zurich Film Festival prompted immediate backlash from viewers and established actors.
When I look at Tilly Norwood’s face, I see a simulacrum of human personhood. The selling point that Particle6 is pushing for it that they want it to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman. Industry icons like Johansson and Portman collaborate with directors and casts with their own identities and personalities. Tilly Norwood will inevitably lead to the degradation of actors.
It reduces the actor’s human position to one of deprivation and strips them of meaning.
News outlets, when reporting on AI and LLMs, make it about job security. It’s far from about that.
What I see when unethical tech monopolies force LLM coagulators into the public climate is the forceful seizure of future meaning and security from our futures.
Where postmodernism has already turned out generations cynical and reluctant to inspire change, LLM technology, in all of its manifestations, will only accelerate that decline.
