Generative AI Could Replace The Internet

Uploaded on 2023-09-04 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Artificial Intelligence, FREE TO VIEW

Generative AI is fast becoming more sophisticated and it could undermine the foundation of the Internet - indeed, it is poised to unleash the next wave of productivity. Generative AI models are changing the economy of the web, making it cheaper to generate lower-quality content.

Generative-based AI systems can create pretty much anything you prompt them to and they can create content based on patterns they’ve learned. Clear milestones, such as when AlphaGo, an AI-based program developed by DeepMind, defeated a world champion Go player in 2016, were celebrated, but then quickly faded from the public’s consciousness.

Generative AI applications such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Stable Diffusion, and others have captured the imagination of people around the world in a way AlphaGo did not, thanks to their broad utility, almost anyone can use them to communicate and create, and preternatural ability to have a conversation with a user.

The latest generative AI applications can perform a range of routine tasks, such as the reorganisation and classification of data. But it is their ability to write text, compose music and to create digital art that has genersted most attention and persuaded consumers and households to experiment on their own.

Generative AI is essentially a more advanced and useful version of the conventional artificial intelligence that already helps power everything from autocomplete to Siri. The big difference is that generative AI can create new content, such as images, text, audio, video, and even code, usually from a prompt or command.

It is important to keep in mind that these science-fiction-like tools are only in their infancy, still becoming more and more refined, convincing, and indistinguishable from human-produced content. The line between machine and human-generated content is being blurred.

Creating false and misleading information has become as easy as writing a prompt and clicking a button, and malicious actors can flood the Internet with fake articles, photos, and videos.

In the past the web used to be a place where people created homepages, forums, and mailing lists. Then companies decided they could do things better. They created slick and feature-rich platforms and threw their doors open for anyone to join. They put boxes in front of us, and we filled those boxes with text and images, and people came to see the content of those boxes. But AI changes these assumptions.

AI systems, particularly the generative models currently in vogue, scale effortlessly. They produce text and images in abundance, and soon, music and video, too. Their output can potentially overrun or outcompete the platforms we rely on for news, information, and entertainment. Many experts claim there is an urgent need for an overarching digital verification infrastructure in an era where seeing is no longer believing.

About 65% of users believe AI tools will replace traditional web search engines as the faster alternative for online search, according to the Generative AI study by Aberdeen Strategy & Research. “In a likely future where more people use chatbots to find answers, there will likely be less of a need to click through to ad-supported websites for more information,” according to Peter Tsai, the head of technology insights at Spiceworks.

We might soon find ourselves in a digital landscape where skepticism is the default, and the saying “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” would evolve into “trust nothing unless verified.” In such a world knowing the origin of a piece of information may be the only way to understand its validity.

Now technological solutions like blockchain could play a crucial role in maintaining trust. A possible solution is having every genuine article or photo stamped with a blockchain-verified digital watermark that would serve as a guarantee of authenticity.

Generative AI Future

All this being said, the role of generative AI in our future is not only negative of course, it’s the unchecked proliferation and misuse we must protect ourselves from. We should bear in mind that all technological advances bring certain challenges with them, and instead of panicking, we should simply be prepared. Experts are calling to develop AI-driven verification tools, establish international regulatory standards that will hold creators of malicious AI content accountable, and promote digital literacy programs both in schools and for older generations.

Generative AI has the power to upend a lot of things, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll make them worse. Its ability to automate tasks may give humans more time to focus on the stuff that can’t be done by increasingly sophisticated machines, as has been true for technological advances before it.

In the near future, once the bugs are worked out, it could make searching the web better. In the years and decades to come, it might even make everything else better, too.

I-HIS: Spiceworks: The Verge: LinkedIn: Vox: McKinsey Image: Google DeepMind

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