15 February 2024

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch has become sentient. 

Recently, it has become almost impossible not to be aware of recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly with the launch in November 2022 of the user-friendly ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer). AI refers to computer systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. Successive prompts and replies, known as prompt engineering, allows machines to learn from experience. It can produce voice, text or images.

The International Monetary Fund recently wrote, Historically, automation and information technology have tended to affect routine tasks, but one of the things that sets AI apart is its ability to impact high-skilled jobs.

In the traditionally high-skilled world of writing and journalism, AI-powered tools are already being used to automate tasks such as writing articles, producing graphics and editing video and text. The content produced is cheap, fast, consistent and potentially vast. However, AI produced work needs human oversight as it can lack emotion, empathy, originality, versatility and creativity. It is difficult to imagine it carrying out tasks such as “investigative journalism” and bringing down a President. Further, AI’s current ability to produce credible images seems to be lagging behind its ability to produce credible text.

I recently reposed some illustrations from the River and Rowing Museum’s X/Twitter account in which the question was posed, “What happens when you let #ChatGPT loose on the design of the River and Rowing Museum?” The results were a bit of harmless fun with AI, responding to increasingly demanding prompts, producing increasingly ludicrous images of what a rowing museum should look like. However, it should have been expected that, if you ask progressively more stupid questions, you will get progressively more stupid answers. But, if stupid answers are not what you require, human oversight is needed. I recently found an example of where unintentionally ludicrous AI generated images were clearly not checked by any carbon based life form.

The website medium.com seems to have laudable aims. It says:

Medium is a home for human stories and ideas. Here, anyone can share insightful perspectives, useful knowledge, and life wisdom with the world—without building a mailing list or a following first. The internet is noisy and chaotic; Medium is quiet yet full of insight. It’s simple, beautiful, collaborative, and helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say.

Six-months ago, Medium published an article titled, Summary of “The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics” by Daniel James Brown. Credited to an Everett Balstad, it was workman-like with no original or stunning insights but was a perfectly competent if not a little bland piece of work. It contained three links to the book’s listing on Amazon. I am not qualified to say if the text was AI generated but I suspect that the illustrations were:

An obvious question from a human would be why easily available stock pictures released by the film’s producers were not used.

Interestingly, Medium also has an article titled These Words Make it Obvious That Your Text is Written By AI. It makes suggestions on how to edit AI to make it appear more human.

As to moving pictures, I first encountered nonsensical AI generated videos when doing the picture research for Hugh Matheson’s piece on the great German sculler, the late Peter-Michael Kolbe. YouTube has several obituaries of Kolbe that are clearly AI generated and unchecked by anyone who knew or cared. Most are in German, so it is difficult for me to fully check their accuracy but some of the pictures included in the robotic and formulaic edits are obviously wrong. I will not link to them as they are presumably “clickbait” that someone is profiting from.

Of course, these are very early days, we are currently experiencing the Model-T Ford of artificial intelligence. How long before we see the Tesla?

Mea Culpa

I have a postscript to my Peter-Michael Kolbe picture research task. I was looking at the YouTube video of his performance in the Men’s Single Sculls at the 1984 Olympics. In the information box below the video, the results of the race were given: Gold: Pertti Karppinen, FIN. Silver: Peter-Michael Kolbe, FRG. Bronze: Robert Mills, CAN. 

This produced a post in the comment section from what I suspect was a member of Generation X, Y or Z: Thanks for the spoiler in the info.

Someone, likely a Baby Boomer, replied that:  …it was 36 years ago.

Another probable Millennial came back: The current Olympics titles each reveal the winner of every event. Generational decency bypass….

I now realise that I have frequently been guilty of “Generational decency bypass”. I have committed such thoughtless acts as revealing that the Boys in the Boat won their race, the Nazis lost the war and the Titanic sank. Sorry kids.