Artificial Intelligence: the revolution has arrived

While thousands of kids ask the

to write their practical school work and

fashionista Pope Francis

emerge , a handful of top

AI

raised a cry in the sky today and called for

on the advancement of those systems.

Because?

They now say

for society and humanity, according to an open letter they signed.

This person does not exist: we asked Midjourney to compose it by adding a series of commands about gender, age, origin and other characteristics.

We have lived surrounded and assisted by her for a long time, but since last December her presence has become more powerful and sophisticated.

She already wrote, drew, animated and "reanimated" objects and people, but now she

.

(

AI) has finally given birth to a new generation -called "generative" for its ability to conceive original content from the remix of pre-existing materials-, propelling in an amazing way the possibilities that we had already glimpsed: at

of Maria Callas and Elvis Presley, the increasingly perfect memes on

and

that

or

our voice and

.

Ayr Disney presented to society a

that in a very short time will be able to share our spaces, so real.

The Tinkerbell fairy will accompany us in the shower.

with credible voices;

Maradona can interact with attendees in the Tango D10S, and Pope Francis wears a white down jacket: these are some examples of what devices like the MidJourney and Dall-e can create based on a series of instructions.

But beware, its performance varies enormously depending on the skill and

of its operator.

Thus, there is already a whole

, experts in uploading the most precise instructions and techniques for the new methods of assisted creation.

collaborations

Creative human tasks already seem headed for a type of

that -apart from ethical and legal controversies of all kinds- has quickly gone from simple assistance with a draft and express classification of content to the expansion of an

that may soon be the norm.

To create this industrial elephant, we need about twenty indications because the performance of each application varies enormously depending on the expertise and know-how of its operator.

In a few months,

of the advancement of these

-in the production of content- is already creeping into legal and media discussions.

The reason is the

of its progress and improvement to limits in which even the very concept of what we understood as "

" is being reconfigured.

In this matter, everything is dizzying: the image requested a week ago has greatly improved thanks to those who continued to run the same App. The first fear had, once again, dystopian rims.

In December 2022, when the startup

available to the general public

, the old dilemma about the threat that robotization poses to the “human” labor market gained new resonance.

Given the abilities that this new generative AI app demonstrates (with which

and explain complex concepts), the

by the technological stampede would now be those who work in trades or tasks.” creative” and content selection, such as journalists, curators, editors and designers.

The speed with which

have improved their performance based on what they learn, even in very challenging cutting-edge texts,

that "human" translators receive.

And meanwhile, students, in almost any field of knowledge,

: a kind of omniscient PanWikipedia has arrived that is also capable of writing.

Although many voices rushed to clarify that

, others were added to that first impact, very worrying in this era of globalized economies and sensibilities.

What would a field of sunflowers be like as Van Gogh thought, but in the style of Antonio Berni?

Miodjourney says so.

Texts, photos and works of art?

Perhaps one should start by saying that

, essentially a

, is not alone.

Other generative AI, such as Stable

apply similar computer models and procedures, but no longer for the production of texts but

.

If in the 90s of the 20th century the data search engines on the web (such as the primitive AltaVista and Netscape and then the omnipresent Google) became a first computer vector of the infinite ocean of navigable information

, the 21st century finds in generative AIs a new classification phase that consists of detecting patterns and

.

The images of Pope Francis, according to Pablo Xavier.

In other words: under certain directives, a generative AI selects, assembles and “polishes”, with much more refined parameters, all the information available on the network, to yield new and increasingly accurate results.

A generative AI selects, assembles and “polishes”, with much more refined parameters, all the information available on the network, to yield new and increasingly accurate results.

Here it is worth making a clarification.

Since in 1957, at MIT at the University of Massachusetts, the scientist John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" to refer to

, the collective fantasy that one of them imitates or reproduces the ways in which the human being learns or creates has caused more than one sting.

Although

(Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri smart assistants are nothing else), these new chatbots are presented as

that their predecessors did not bring to the fore.

Now, we are told, they have the power to "create."

However,

.

By replacing the biological process of creation, typical of the human brain, with a series of algorithms that make increasingly complex associations, the machines

that characterizes our species.

OpenAI and the ChatGPT logos turned traditional pedagogical strategies around the world upside down.

In New York, educational institutions are prohibited from accessing it.

REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/

Even so, the distances are shortening at a dizzying rate,

... It is enough to give a series of instructions or parameters to DALL-E or MidJourney -the Apps used to illustrate these pages- to verify the

to produce high-impact images, some of which may pass as “original” and give the impression that these chatbots are actually creating their own works.

The reality of the matter, of course, is more complex.

Strictly speaking,

into a new unpublished collage as per our request.

This is not a Titian, although we asked Midjourney to "paint" an apocalyptic picture like him.

Create or copy, that is the question

While millions of people around the world have fun playing and experimenting with these new generative AIs, many of these developer companies -which are the technology giants-

.

As a collateral and extra-legal effect, some "Class Actions" - as lawsuits that bring together a group of victims to represent a much greater damage caused to society are called in the US - served, in turn, to clarify the way in which that these chatbots “create”.

Stability AI, the developer of the "Stable Diffusion" tool,

when it was found that it had been "trained" using databases from LAION, a German company that has been archiving millions of images without paying royalties of use to the artists responsible for their creation.

This is not a Titian, either: Midjourney offered mixed results to our request for a Titian-style apocalyptic image.

To the extent that generative AIs

to "create" new ones (through a complex process of "noise" and rarefactions applied to the original image, called "diffusion"), already it is easier to understand that

of the tool

, but whose true authors (let's say, from its "base paste ”) are made invisible and, therefore, violated in the economic rights related to the exploitation or use of their works.

What appears to be an original creation of the tool is, neither more nor less, a sophisticated digital collage based on images, texts and information available on the web.

The lawsuits erupted

at the end of January and the effect of their revelations soon spread geographically throughout the United States;

now they threaten to move to Europe.

Deepfake Pope Francis.

As the lawsuit against Stability AI continues in Delaware, the New York Copyright Office

for fully digital comics created by the MidJourney engine, and whose "human" authorship cannot be proven.

By establishing that legal protection will not apply to aspects or "parts" of the work created by these AIs, they are endorsing the arguments that support the lawsuits filed in court: to the extent that these engines were trained using

, the originality of the artistic result produced is doubtful.

If some specialized publications estimate, for example, that DALL-E has been fed more than

, it is clear that the legal door is just closing ajar.

While the new phase of technological development rearranges once again our capacities for wonder -and

, some

to avoid greater evils and try to regulate the advent of this first generation of generative AI.

Elon Musk is one of the more than a thousand signatories of a public letter in which businessmen and experts from the technology sector ask for a six-month stoppage in the development of AI: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

The European Union (which already launched a first

in 2021) intends to regulate them, limiting their use in the selection of personnel or in intelligence tasks.

The Joe Biden administration

to regulate its use and preserve the rights of citizens within increasingly autonomous computerized systems governed by non-human intelligence.

The New York Department of Education has

as have some financial institutions in the country.

As part of the new cold war between the US and China, the latter has already begun to block devices and apps that lead to GPT chat, just one of the many devices that promise to revolutionize the ways in which we create art and knowledge.

Deeper still, the very concept of “

” is finally diluted.

China's quick reaction is neither accidental nor devoid of strategic sense.

Ernie, the AI-powered chatbot from Badiu (the “Google of China”) promises to add to this cultural, economic and political fabric soon, as Google, Microsoft and other techno companies warn Biden that excessive regulation of generative

can give their eastern rival (not constrained by the institutional demands of Western democracies) a paramount

in the technological escalation that has been facing them for years.

A response from ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, is seen on its web page in this illustration image taken February 9, 2023. REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration

But this Wednesday, more than a thousand leaders in the sector have called for an urgent stoppage.

Among the more than a thousand main signatories, according to the Catalan newspaper

, are Elon Musk, the CEO of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, DeepMind researchers -owned by Alphabet-, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Professor Yuval Noah Harari and industry leaders such as Yoshua Bengio or Stuart Russell.

As they agree (and have published) "powerful artificial intelligence systems should only be developed once we are sure that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable."

And they anticipate that these systems could generate economic and political disruption, for example.

For this reason, now it is they themselves who are

.

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