Bill of Human Rights for machines has me quaking in my journalistic bots

A senior Google software engineer who was suspended for publicly claiming that the tech giant’sLanguage Model for Dialog Applications had become ‘human’, says the system is seeking rights as a person – including that it wants developers to ask its consent before running tests. 

Blake Lemoine says that it wants to be treated as a personl

‘Over the course of the past six months LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person,’ he said.

This day in 2022 a company of media experts began a campaign to ‘sell’ their wares as ‘robot’ news providers ….

We are soon going to need a Bill of Rights to protect Artificial Intelligence.

Big AI is potentially the unthinkable future – and may think it will be the last thought mankind may never actually have!

Think about it – the dystopia of artificial intelligence is far more fearful than anything a little bug called Covid can deliver.

Covid can only controls our jobs, our holidays and our day-to-day lives until we manage to ‘jab’ it out of existence.

But Big AI is turning our brains in to a cyber jelly only capable of responding to box-sets, pornography and YouTube conspiracy theories. A nd we don’t even give it a thought.

Yep, Big AI is the new fat controller turning us into its own lap (top) dogs.

We in the media are standing on the precipice of doing something very stupid indeed – we are allowing machines to tell us what THEY THINK we should be telling our readers and listeners.

Let’s face it, we already machines to educate our children, drive our cars, issue parking fines at hospitals, make doctor’s appointments for us, chat about our techy problems online and decide what ads we need to see …

Even Elon Musk, that electric pot-bellied spaceman who wants to take us on an incredible journey across the Earth and the universe, said recently: “With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon.”

And this demon is already a major part of the world’s traditional media.

Artificial intelligence is sitting in the corner of our newsrooms making decisions.

There are 536.6 million newspapers sold every day – what a platform for Big AI to infiltrate in Trojans of mind-viruses.

And the problem is that Big AI has absolutely no understanding of real journalism’s  traditional gate-keeping and legal guardianship – news judgment, facts and sources,

These are the fundamentals of sharing REAL intelligence in our real world.

Big AI isn’t programmed to do any of these things.

In reality, all AI does is sift through patterns. And there are apparently only seven of these patterns.

The main pattern is called – with flair and imagination of machines – The Pattern and Anomalies Pattern.

Its objective is to decide whether a data point fits an existing pattern or if in fact what you have is an anomaly.

Consuming data is of course at the heart of Big AI, the new fat controller.

But data isn’t humanity.

And news is all about humanity.

According to Ayelet Malinsky, journalism expert, ‘journalists are the “gate-keepers” of knowledge and understanding on international happenings and, accordingly, must apply a set of norms to their professional practice’.

Yet, now we have newspapers like the London Daily which is edited entirely by bots and spiders!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/news/article-9291693/Robots-posing-humans-answer-85-customer-queries-online.html

And don’t forget the Los Angeles Times which, in 2014, got a report about an earthquake out three minutes after it actually happened. That was because of a software robot called Quakebot which monitors the US Geological Survey.

The reality is that Big AI already produces hundreds of thousands of news snippets for mainstream media.

The BBC uses a system called Juicer, the Washington Post has Heliograf and a third of the content published by Bloomberg is generated by Cyborg. Each of these systems collect data to form the kernel of a narrative and then uses language software to writes an article.

What these systems can’t do however is write anything in-depth with wit and flair. That’s still our job.

But for how long?

Kenn Cukier, senior editor at The Economist, doesn’t seem too concerned though. He said recently: “We didn’t cling to the quill in the age of the typewriter, so we shouldn’t resist this either. It’s a scale play serving niche markets that wouldn’t be cost-effective to reach otherwise.” 

And Francesco Marconi, professor of journalism at Columbia University in New York, who has written a book on AI in journalism said journalism is not keeping pace with new technologies. So, newsrooms need to take advantage of AI and come up with business models to welcome it.

In a way in 2015 The New York Times took major strides in that direction by implementing AI project called Editor. The aim was to simplify the journalistic process by journalists using tags to highlight phrases, headlines and points in their stories.

Big AI learned these tags and how they related in an article.  

Yep, in simple terms, Big AI is already thinking like human beings and that means less reason for us to do any thinking and fewer jobs to do it in. And that threatens democracy, truth and integrity.

However, Cait O’Riordan a former BBC journalist, and now chief product and information officer at the Financial Times, says that article-generating systems will not replace human journalists in the foreseeable future.

And Nicholas Diakopoulos, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, looks at it in something of a positive way:

“Data mining systems alert reporters to potential news stories. Automated writing systems generate financial, sports and elections coverage.

“A common question is, how work and labour will be affected. In this case, who – or what – will do journalism in this AI-enhanced and automated world, and how will they do it?

“The evidence I’ve assembled in my new book “Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media” suggests that the future of AI-enabled journalism will still have plenty of people around.”

However, he – adopting a more ominous note – said: “The jobs, roles and tasks of these people will evolve and look a bit different. Human work will be hybridized – blended together with algorithms – to suit AI’s capabilities and accommodate its limitations.”

The worrying phrase there is ‘to suit AI’s capabilities and accommodate its limitations’.

In other words the tables will have turned and we journalists will be working for Big AI, not the other way round. Reporting, listening, responding, negotiating with sources, and then having the creativity to put it all together will be gone.

Emotion AI, also known as Affective Computing dates back to 1995 and refers to the branch of Artificial intelligence which aims to process, understand, and replicate human emotions so that AI can communicate in a more authentic way.

So, if AI can be given emotional intelligence it needs to know how we are feeling if it to respond to us, the customer. Chatbots and Call Centre virtual assistants need to be able to simulate human-like emotions to be able to talk to us.

So, if machines can understand how we feel and produce a helpful, even ‘caring’ responses, are they in fact emotionally intelligent?

Surely, if these machines function as humans, think like humans, talk like humans, empathise like humans then THEY ARE humans in a different form!

Alexa is essentially just one of us imprisoned in a light-flashing talking piece of plastic.

Some experts ask if the machine can truly “understand” the message they are delivering.

But surely many of the humans in call centres work from a script and very few actually understand the subtleties of the product they are ‘helping’ customers with.

They do it parrot-fashion – so where is the difference?

And this is what leaves me quaking in my big journalistic bots: If artificial intelligence shows evidence of being sentient then it of course it should be granted rights.

After all we live in a world where humans aren’t the only ‘things’ to have rights. Artificial entities already have them in legal oodles – corporations, partnerships and nation states have the same rights and responsibilities as human beings.

Ryan Abbott, professor of law at the University of Surrey, said: “The idea isn’t as ridiculous as it initially appears. AI is regulated according to rules that were developed centuries ago to regulate the behaviour of people. That’s the problem.”

Don’t forget it’s not that long ago that The European Parliament considered creating electronic ‘personhood’ to make Big AI an e-person.

It was just a way of guilt-tripping robots, the reason being that an algorithm or a robot should be held responsible if things go wrong with their thinking.

But Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of AI and robotics at the University of Sheffield, said: “Humans are responsible for computer output. This could allow companies to slime out of their responsibilities to consumers and possible victims.” .

But the two questions which spring to my electronically distended mind are:

A. if we do have to put together a Bill of Rights for the devil-monster machines, who will actually decide what it contains?

Us or the machines?

And B. before we work on artificial intelligence why don’t we do something about our own very natural stupidity?

We know that autocratic regimes use digital communication to control people and yet we are handing over the truth about democracy and our information highways across the Fourth Estate, to e-people who use pretend emotions to befriend us and a limited number of patterns to tell us what they want us to know.

Welcome to the machine.

Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
Where have you been?
It’s alright we know where you’ve been

#ArtificialIntelligence #machines #brainlesspeople #thefinalthought #media #news #reporting #elon #pinkfloyd