John Oliver covered the dangers of AI on his show, calling it “worryingly corrosive” for society. I'm with you, John! Via the Guardian:
On Last Week Tonight, Oliver said that the “spread of AI generation tools has made it very easy to flood social media sites with cheap, professional-looking, often deeply weird content” using the term AI slop to describe it all.
He referred to it as the “newest iteration of spam” with weird images and videos flooding people’s feeds, with some people having “absolutely no idea that it isn’t real”.
Oliver said that it was “extremely likely that we are gonna be drowning in this shit for the foreseeable future”.
With content such as this, “the whole point is to grab your attention” and given how easy it has become to make it, the barrier of entry has been reduced.
And as he points out, AI can be dangerous:
Generative AI has also been used during the Israel-Iran conflict and posed problems for first responders with the flooding in North Carolina last year. It was also used by Republicans to show that Biden was not handling the latter situation well, with fake images used on the right despite them being told they weren’t real.
“It’s pretty fucking galling for the same people who spent the past decade screaming ‘fake news’ at any headline they didn’t like to be confronted with actual fake news and suddenly be extremely open to it,” he said.
While the spread wasn’t as damaging as some head feared during last year’s US election, AI is “already significantly better than it was then”.
He added: “It’s not just that we can get fooled by fake stuff, it’s that the very existence of it then empowers bad actors to dismiss real videos and images as fake.”
