Lots of stuff in the press about AI which raises some interesting questions-and concerns!

Of course AI has been around for some time now and we probably don't think much about things like their use in our "smart" phones, marketing algorithms or manufacturing as this has been commonplace for a while now but concerns over extension of its uses has only increased lately.

A lot of the questions are around safety and morality. In the case of driver-less cars, for example, it is primarily about safety but for control of weapons it is more around the morality of using AI to make decisions of whether to kill or not.

Whilst there are reports of AI being used successfully to write CVs for people, for example, the failings of Microsoft's chatbox have led to questions not only over its suitability but also inherent dangers in the system. Inappropriate responses from the system have led many to stop using it.

In art there is the story of an AI generated photograph winning the Sony picture award and also of AI creating a collaboration Drake/Weekend song. In the case of the latter the technique clearly still needs refinement but the photo looks pretty good! The winner of the photo competition has a wealth of photographic experience however and so the data he has to draw on to assist the tech.to come up with the resulting image was the main reason for its success. It does raise questions about both "art" and also legitimacy of ownership though. In terms of art, I guess "art" has always been a mixture of both idea and craftsmanship. You could still give credit to someone having the idea of using technology to take existing artefacts and "create" something new I suppose. This is nothing new, in music people have always drawn from past works to create new ones for example, whether that be borrowing riffs or chord progression or pure sampling. The ethical issues lie around giving credit to those original artists or asking permission from them. To not do so could easily be seen as a kind of identity theft which is how Drake and the Weekend obviously viewed it. It can be a bit of a grey area though. We are all bound to just sort of absorb influences and it's not always a case of blatantly stealing someone else's ideas. George Harrison famously got sued for using the Chiffons "He's so fine" as a basis for "My Sweet Lord" but the conscious intent was very likely never there. On the other hand many guitar riffs are based on old blues ones and are so common it makes determining the original credit both impossible and pointless. And there are, of course, only so many notes to play with to begin with!

Like all technology, there is the capacity to use it for either good or bad (e.g. deep fake photography could be easily used for criminal activities) so whilst I'm sure there are some benefits to be had, concerns over its misuses leading to some sci-fi like dystopian society may not be far off the mark. Plenty of experts in the field seem to be advising caution. Guess it's a bit like the concept of cloning and genetic engineering. As Jeff Goldblum's character says in Jurassic Park : they were so busy trying to prove that they could do it that nobody stopped to ask if they should.