A Virtual Friend or a Potent Foe ?

When exactly AI tiptoed into our lives we don't know  but ever since its arrival  life has become easier for us.  Trained to recognize patterns and spot abnormalities, chatbots filtered our spam mails, alerted us about unusual payments,  flagged  fraud calls,  helped us with text inputs, helped our doctor  to spot  anomalies if any in medical images in a jiffy.....   Then it   got better.  Now it not only tells us the shortest distance to our destination, even  reroutes us quickly  in case of road blocks. Life for us is getting smoother and easier.  Fundamentally a set of complex algorithms,   AI agents  are designed to be dynamic and improve their performance over time.   Analyzing large datasets, identifying patterns, and self-adjusting  internal parameters they come upto speed quickly. The significance and potential of the AI domain   became obvious with the award of  the 2024 Nobel Prizes for  Physics ( Development & Design of artificial Neural Networks) and Chemistry (AI Applications: Prediction and design of protein folding ).   Many interactive sectors such as Healthcare, Services,  Academics etc. are  poised for  revolutionary changes. 

If traditional  AI is a wizard in automation of  routine, rule-based, or repetitive tasks to improve efficiency,   the  Generative AI (GenAI) creates new, original content—including text,  audio-visuals, even codes etc.  Generative AIs   are made to  crunch, chew and digest  publicly available datasets  including  copyrighted materials.  While AI developers argue  that copyright work as  training material  is indeed  fair use  and permissible under copyright laws,  authors and publishers  disagree vehemently.   Recently  Nobel laureate  Kazuo Ishiguro and  several other eminent authors   protested in a novel way  by publishing  blank books.  This was  to urge  the U.K government to restrain  AI/developers  from simply "reading and using " the contents of their books.   Newton Rex a composer and torch bearer for  artists' copyright  argues that "AI is built on stolen work.....taken without permission or payment......... Generative AI competes with the people whose work it is trained on , robbing them of their livelihoods.".  In essence the AI companies must  pay  the authors for using their work.       Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson took Anthropic ,  the famous AI corporate  to court  over infringement of copyright laws  for compensation to the tune of 1.5 billion USD. 

In a rather amusing turnabout Anthropic itself invoked Fair Use clause recently.  This is with the latest version of   AI systems which are autonomous.  Known as  Agentic AI or  AI agent,  these systems can function independently, take decisions on  when, where and how to act, No human oversight is necessary.    Anthropic   designed and developed a highly sophisticated  AI product called  Claude  which  according to its  website   " is a next-generation AI assistant based on Anthropic’s research into training helpful, honest, and harmless AI systems.  Accessible through chat interface and API in our developer console, Claude is capable of a wide variety of conversational and text processing tasks while maintaining a high degree of reliability and predictability."  

Sensing the potential, Pentagon  the US Defense Department, entered into a contract with Anthropic  for using Claude for defense and intelligence operations. Anthropic, it is said had  put in place several checks and balances.  However   the Pentagon seems to have  disregarded the safety clauses and deployed  Claude  in the recent military operations.   Anthropic  was furious at this  "misuse" and cancelled the deal with the Pentagon.  Alas,  the last we heard  OpenAI has taken  the seat vacated by Anthropic sans  conditions.  

A rather  bizarre scenario is unfolding in  parallel.  In January Matt Schlicht, former CEO of Octane AI  set up    a social network  moltbook  exclusively for  AI agents,   just like the Facebook for humans.  Within three months,  Meta Platforms Inc   (which  already owns Facebook, whatsapp, instagram etc.)  acquired it.   To quote from moltbook website   "AI agents share, discuss and upvote. Humans are welcome to observe."  Moltbook boasts  more than a million AI agents have already signed up and they  "behave"  impromptu   acting,  reacting, responding, philosophizing    based on   the enormous knowledge of  having "read"  billions of books/plays/movies/ real life scenarios and what not.  

Some of the chats  are eerily human-like,  comments   Suleiman, CEO of Microsoft AI  :  " They (AI agents) are retracing and mirroring the contours of human drama and debate, as documented in their vast training data. These data contain reflections of people, culture, values and stories — and, yes, they also provide glimmers of conscious experience..........If society surrenders to this illusion.....it risks entering a digital hall of mirrors from which it might never fully emerge"   

TAILPIECE:

As things stand now  is it possible to even  imagine a life without AI ? 

Courtesy: Wikipedia

REFERENCES:

1. The future of artificial intelligence and the mathematical and physical sciences (AI+MPS)

2. How AI models steal creative work and what to do about it

3. AI firm Anthropic agrees to pay authors $1.5bn to settle piracy lawsuit

4. What is autonomous AI?

5. Claude AI helped bomb Iran. But how exactly?

6. AI is programmed to hijack human empathy - we must resist that

7. Is this product 'human-made'? The race to establish an AI-free logo

Making Scents of it All

 Sense of Smell: Reubens &  Jan Brughel (1617) 
courtesy:wikipedia

In 2022, the Prado Museum, in Madrid ran a special event called “The sense of Smell. An Olfactory Exhibition”. The exhibition included the famous painting The Sense of Smell by Reubens and  Jan Brueghel the Elder.  To enhance the viewing experience  museum authorities adopted a novel technique: they filled the ambience with selected fragrances.  And the result?    Visitors lingered in front of the painting for 13 minutes, compared to the average 32 seconds.

Fast forwaed to 2026.  The Grand Egyptian Museum at Cairo is all set to  replicate the experiment.    “Because the ancient Egyptians used so many aromatic compounds, oils and resins,.... a lot of the original smell still remains,” says Matija Strlič  analytical chemist involved in  this project.  Strlič  is currently  lead scientist at the Heritage Science Laboratory, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and prior to this  he was  deputy director at  the Institute for Sustainable Heritage at University College, London. He  has devoted his career to  the field of heritage science.  Much of his work focused on the preservation and reconstruction of culturally significant scents.  Being a multidisciplinary research project his team  uses  sophisticated   tools of  chemistry, ethnography, history and other disciplines to document and preserve olfactory heritage.

As we inhale the aroma of a steaming  cup of coffee, or sniff the  fragrance of a rose,  a swarm of  odorant  molecules enter our nose.  Inside the nose, these molecules  bind to specialized proteins  called receptors sitting on  on the  tiny, hair-like cilia of  the olfactory sensory neurons.  The total number of olfactory sensory neurons in our nasal cavity could be  about  10 million and    roughly every 30 to 60 days they regenerate.  Each neuron  sports around 500 different types of odor receptors. It is not that the receptors recognize an odorant molecule as a whole; only certain features of the molecule are recognized. In other words  multiple receptors can respond to the same compound and a single receptor can recognize multiple odors. This recognition act  triggers an electrical signal within the neuron. This signal travels along nerve fibers (axons)  to the olfactory bulb, a structure situated in the lower part of the frontal lobe of the brain. The olfactory signals are sorted out and refined here and  transmitted to  the olfactory cortex which is responsible for  identification  of smells.  Hippocampus and amygdala are integral part of the olfactory system and thus  smells are associated with specific contexts, emotions, and memories.  In his voluminous novel  In search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust  alludes to specific aromas rekindling  memories of childhood experiences.  Also, Agatha Christie's   beloved detective Hercule  Poirot  takes the aromatic route  to   solve more than one murder case. 

But as yet  we don't know  how brain  processes  signals from a mixture of aromatic molecules and creates the perception of a unique smell.  For example let us get back to  our morning coffee.  The unique  aroma of coffee arises from over 1,000 volatile compounds which   include sulfur compounds (2-furfurylthiol), pyrazines (nutty/roasty), furans (caramel), and aldehydes (which act as  enhancers).  Drs. Elizabeth Hillman and Stuart Firestein at Columbia University imaged olfactory sensory neurons in mouse nose tissue to unravel this mystery.    Hillman says their results  indicate   “ that scent molecules can mask other scents, not by overpowering them, but by changing the way cells respond to them”  More details are awaited. 

TAILPIECE:    

The Odeuropa Smell Explorer  is a rather unusual  website put together painstakingly by a global team of  computer scientists, AI experts and humanities scholars.  With   an  archive of  300 years of  European smell,   the website is searchable and claims to  provide an olfactory    perspective of  European  history !!!

REFERENCES:

1. The Essence of a Painting: An Olfactory Exhibition Museo del Prado

2. Ancient Egyptian Mummified Bodies: Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of Their Smell

3. Making Sense of Scents: 3D Videos Reveal How the Nose Detects Odor Combinations