Science Delights: 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 ?