Sophia White-

Artificial Intelligence, AI for short, is a technology that has been increasingly used over the past decade. It has created robots who can talk about any subject you wish, apps like ChatGPT, and the AI on Snapchat who is becoming more and more disappointing. These are feats in technological advancement for the future to come with self-driving cars and planes as the next step. With all these new features that come with AI technology comes my paranoia and skepticism.

This may sound ridiculous, but I was always fearful of robots taking over the world as a child. So much so that I thought one of my father’s colleagues was a robot herself. The truth is that the possibility of your colleague becoming a robot in today’s society is becoming more and more real. There are many ways in which AI technology should be something we fear. One day my job as a writer for the Weekly might be taken over by ChatGPT. Some of the ChatGPT prompts still lack human-like responses, but the application will eventually change to learn how to give stronger answers.

The same app is used by students to have essays written for them. It is a site where plagiarism runs rampant. Generations of natural imagination and creativity run the risk of being completely useless because of apps like this.

I asked for some opinions on this topic and all of them stated that AI weirds them out or has the capability to be creepy and dangerous. AI can collect information from your phone without you even knowing it. Granted, you run the risk of your information being stolen if you have a phone in the first place, but AI is one of the many things that use that information to manipulate you. To clarify, there are parts of AI that I enjoy and find amusing. I do giggle a bit at the AI voice generation of Biden, Obama, and Trump playing Minecraft with Ice Spice, but is it not a bit frightening that your voice, face, or likeness can be used without your knowledge through these different AI applications?

This version of AI that I find myself laughing at is classified as “deep fakes”. This is the technology that creates voice generation and facial tracking and generation that follows an individual’s likeness. I find this AI technology to be the most problematic with its capability to incriminate anyone. It can create recordings of a politician or artist to say something that could ruin their livelihoods. Deep fakes have been developed over the last decade from politicians lip-syncing to songs to what is now people dancing with celebrities’ faces changing over the person’s body. The most disturbing versions of these are incidents of pornographic deep fakes. These kinds of deep fakes will continue to get worse and worse until it reaches a point where we can no longer make statements about what we even know about ourselves or others. Are there no ethical considerations for this technology while it’s being developed? It’s true that the advancements in this technology could be beneficial in making code-writing more efficient. It creates digital assistants that aid us in our work. Efficiency is valuable when it comes to capitalistic systems.

But, do we need high-level efficiency that much as to sacrifice our own privacy? I genuinely believe that AI could be something useful to human life, but I also believe that it is a technology that we should not let be in the hands of people either. AI technology is a dangerous tool that can manipulate our opinions or others and pin ourselves against each other.

The United States is already a divided nation and with issues like cancel culture, we risk further division with the use of AI technology in the wrong hands. Nothing will seem trustworthy and at every corner, people will seem suspect.

Like with the Marvel universe, you have many different AIs that have been developed by scientists. If we take Tony Stark’s Jarvis, for example, he’s a very useful tool when it comes to designing suits, recognizing problems, and aiding in Tony’s goals. In contrast, when we get to the Age of Ultron film, Tony takes his aspirations of global peace too far and creates a suit of armor with an AI inside it. And -spoiler!- this becomes Ultron… the supervillain of the movie that attempts to kill all of mankind.

Truly, I do not think it is too far of a stretch to believe that this is something that could be created in our lifetimes. A scientist could aspire to make a global peace-making robot, but then that AI is manipulated and changed by someone for the worse. I worry what technology like AI could create if it were placed in the wrong hands. That is why I think AI needs more ethical considerations than it currently has and more people need to be wary of advancements on this topic.