SPEAK UP: What are your hopes and fears about A.I.?

Do you fear Skynet, look forward to animal videos on demand...or is it a little of both?

That’s no puppy. A computer dreamed it up out of noise.

Last week, OpenAI announced Sora, a new text-to-video tool. From a few sentences of descriptive text the tool can produce a very believable-looking video clip, full of photorealistic detail. There are some glitches, sure — computers seem to have a hard time figuring out how many legs to give an insect — but at a glance, or in a social media feed it’s hard to distinguish from reality.

Certainly this will empower a new generation of no-budget filmmakers, but having spoken earlier this week with Sneha Revanur, the youth activist who’s been working tirelessly with her team to head off the possibility of A.I. disaster, we have concerns: far more convincing deepfakes; difficult to debunk documentation of invented events on a scale that might distort our understanding of the real thing; fake news on an unforseen scale.

It’s no surprise, then, to learn that more Americans are concerned about A.I. than are excited about it. But we want to know what you think about the latest advances in artificial intelligence. Are any of you using A.I. tools in your work, creative pursuits, or anything else you do? Alternately, have any of you fallen afoul of facial recognition, or is anyone facing the near term possibility of job loss? Should we be making peace with our augmented future? Or worrying about being made obsolete?

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On another note, we want to highlight this great discussion in the comments on our recent column from Anat Shenker-Osario on the fight for trans rights, from brand-new Ink subscriber Tucker Lieberman:

“Sometimes people will ask me (I'm trans and middle-age) whether I have been, or would be, impacted in some material way by policies imposed on transgender people to restrict our lives. This question is often well-meaning. Its premise is that if trans adults can't explain how we're being hurt, it's harder for anyone to understand or believe that the gender policies are actually anti-trans, and more difficult for allies to stand up for us because they don't know what harms to speak up about. They're asking for an objectively verifiable list of traumas. Of course, that requires effort, and there's no reason to trust strangers with personal information.”

Anat entered the thread:

“Now comes your point about being asked to "prove" that some policy would harm you. Here is where the rest of what we've seen prove effective messaging comes into play: naming clear villains, ascribing motivations to their nefarious deeds, and making clear we can defeat them… So — when folks ask you (eye roll) to list out current or impending harms — I would remember that no question has to be answered literally and reframe to say what it is you actually want.”

And a really insightful discussion followed, about the distinctions between good- and bad-faith argument and how to bridge the gap between political allies who may disagree on some fundamental questions. It’s exactly the sort of honest, respectful, and illuminating conversation we like to see here, and the care and kindness with which the participants handled their differences of opinion reminds us just how much we appreciate about the community here at The Ink. These discussion threads are for paid subscribers, and we expect everyone to conduct themselves in the spirit of inquiry and collegiality and openness.

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Image: OpenAI