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You can't open a newspaper these days without seeing another article on some aspect of Artificial Intelligence, or as it is called simply AI.
The AI industry is growing fast with scores of companies producing it. The one we mostly hear about is OpenAI's ChatGPT, but as a Forbes article stated recently, there are many others with startups joining every day and all are driven by billions of dollars of investment. Like everything else, it's all about money.
According to the Forbes piece on the top 50 companies, "Newcomers to the list include $2.5 billion-valued Anysphere (better known as Cursor), a three year-old AI startup that helps engineers write and edit code and has at least $100 million in annualized revenue; the $1 billion-valued AI language tutor app Speak, which is used by some 10 million people to learn English and Spanish; and Massachusetts-based unicorn OpenEvidence, which is building an AI-powered search platform that summarizes medical information for doctors."
Artificial Intelligence technology can and is being used in almost every aspect of our lives, some of it is good but some of it can be not so good. One of the not so good things, in my opinion, is when AI is used in an attempt to duplicate a human being either in voice or image or many times in both. This can be dangerous if used as a new technical way to scam and cheat. And it is doing that very thing right now.
Even before the advent of AI there had been an active scam aimed at senior citizens. Older people get telephone calls from young voices who claim to be "grandsons," or other family members who are in dire circumstances, they say, wrongly arrested and being held by authorities until bail money can be sent to rescue them. "Hello, grandpa, I'm in trouble and I need a thousand dollars immediately." Believe it or not, many seniors fall for this and wire money to their supposed "grandson."
Now the scam becomes worse when you add AI technology to it. The voice will sound remarkably close or even identical to the voice of the supposed "grandson" and unless the victim asks pointed questions to the caller, such as dates and events that only the family would know about, the scammer will be able to pull it off.
Not long ago I watched a creepy example of AI imaging used to bring old time performers back to life. One of them used animating images of John Gilbert and synchronized them with Text-to-Speech voice cloning taken from an actual recording of his speech. Gilbert, a famous actor in silent movies, never actually said the words in this video himself but there he was, talking and looking like he looked in his prime.
Another video I saw was of entertainment giant Al Jolson. This 1929 recording of Al Jolson merged with an AI video of Jolson which was reanimated. Animating a photo of Jolson and synchronizing its movements with the 78RPM recording made to promote his latest film, "Say it With Songs." The voice was perfect. The image was definitely Al Jolson. And yet it wasn't.
Although the voice and video captured the John Gilbert and Al Jolson images, there is something missing. Hard to put in words exactly, but watching these videos which are definitely creepy, you soon realize that there is something artificial with them. Call it a soul, or maybe just the human element of a person wasn't there.
The eyes, although they physically resembled the person's eyes, were empty, devoid of life. Robotic is one way of putting it, but like I say, there was no human essence of the real person there. The soul was missing.
I can't imagine that AI will ever be able to fully duplicate the actual person it claims itself to be. No technology can ever become truly human in the way that a real person is human. There are simply too many aspects to a human being's personality that cannot be mimicked. All the little nuances, the life in the eyes, the tilt of the head, the breathing, well, the total humanness of that particular person.
AI can come close. But in the end it still looks like an animated cartoon. A robot. No, AI is advanced technology, but it is not G od. Not even close. And we can thank the Heavens for that.
(COMMENT, BELOW)