Paul Watson’s posts tagged “Artificial Intelligence”

It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.

Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens . Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.

So after Robb pointed out that Perplexity AI wasn’t using the correct User Agent I had a thought about how else you could prevent your pages from at least being summarised.

Generative AI is like the ultimate idea guy’s idea! Imagine… if all they needed to create a business, software or art was their great idea, and a computer. No need to engage (or pay) any of those annoying makers who keep talking about limitations, scope, standards, artistic integrity etc. etc.

The parallels between the turbulent epochs preceding the medieval Renaissance and our present age verge on uncanny. Today, intersecting economic, political and environmental crises have incited widespread disorientation and despair reminiscent of the Dark Ages. Below these swirling surface breakdowns, advanced digital technologies are birthing new platforms for human creative participation that could see the dawn of a modern-day Renaissance 2.0.

Ironically the first people who'll be made redundant from AI image generation are those who are currently feeding in prompts to create AI images and calling themselves artists. They're currently giving all the data to the AI with which it will replace them.

Emerging research indicates vast amounts of energy and water are being consumed by the data centres powering these large language models. However, discussions around these concerns are often obscured by the ongoing promotion of AI as a progressive too – especially when related to human ingenuity and originality. It seems an opportune time to ask one of these language models, in this case Bing Copilot, powered by GPT-4, about its own perceived environmental impact.

However, in recognition that a singular query contributes approximately 4.32g of CO₂, compared to Google queries which generate approximately 0.2g of CO₂, these questions were kept to a fair minimum.

Things become altogether more complex when you experiment with engaging ChatGPT as a research assistant. It will produce relatively accurate and well-written prose on general subjects or well-known authors that feature prominently on Wikipedia and other such openly accessible platforms. But a more specific subject – I tried “manuscript illumination in the Tournai region around 1400” – will wake up another side of the chatbot. It will then provide information that looks very convincing but that turns out to be completely irrelevant. When asked to clarify, it will vehemently insist on its mistakes, or it will apologise while making new ones without blinking an eye.

It seems ironic that even as smart phones have made photography accessible to most people, allowing the average person to take more photos in a week than they might have in a year with film cameras, as well as access to huge free, attribution-licensed photo libraries from all those other photographers on Flickr, Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons, etc, people still “need” to generate AI graphics for their email newsletter or blog 🙄 Bottomless photos weren’t enough; now everything else must be bottomless too.

Taken all this into account, it is possible that the emissions from a ChatGPT query are more than a hundred times that of a conventional search query. But as I don't have enough data to back this up, I will keep the conservative estimates from above (50x - 90x; 60x most likely).

The output of generative tools based on large language models gives me the ick.