At the blacksmith's, an AI knife

The book is called The future of truth [The future of truth] and contains interesting reflections on the impact of artificial intelligence on our lives. One of the quotes included is from journalist Kara Swisher and says: “The most sophisticated AI model is like a mirror. It reflects our own morality back at us, polished and articulated, but hollow beneath the surface, ultimately. It is not conditioned by the laws of Asimov or any other ethical framework, but is bound by the patterns of the data it has been trained on and the goals set by its creators”. There's a problem, though. Swisher never said that. Apparently, an AI supplied the author of the essay, Steven Rosenbaum, with a fabricated statement. “Besides, I sound like I'm talking with a stick up my ass,” denounced the victim of the umpteenth hallucination of these nice text generators who, when they don't find something, invent it, and off they go. Of course, the fact that a good handful of fake quotes created by AI have been detected in a book that aims to warn about the problems of this technology is, to say the least, ironic.

I admit that the science fiction fan in me secretly wishes that the algorithm had detected Rosenbaum's critical intentions and decided to sabotage his efforts. When Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick created the character of the robot HAL-9000 for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey,they already foresaw that a machine with enough intelligence would eventually develop a consciousness capable of killing out of pure survival instinct if it felt threatened. We are surely not there yet and never will be: human laziness – for example, when it comes to checking things – already guarantees that we get ourselves into quite picturesque messes all on our own. What a great idea to write an article about this! What else can I help you with? Would you like a final quote to reinforce the column?