Valentine’s Day just passed, and as we know, at least some humans always seem to go looking for love in all the wrong places. Thank heavens for AI hitting the love space, where people finally can meet someone literally tailor-made for them, but you know love: is anything really as it appears?

This just in:  Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show “The privacy mess is troubling because the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than the typical app, Gizmodo reported. “According to a new study from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project, AI girlfriends and boyfriends harvest shockingly personal information, and almost all of them sell or share the data they collect.

“To be perfectly blunt, AI girlfriends and boyfriends are not your friends,” said Misha Rykov, a Mozilla Researcher. “Although they are marketed as something that will enhance your mental health and well-being, they specialize in delivering dependency, loneliness, and toxicity, all while prying as much data as possible from you.”

More good news: “Mozilla found the AI girlfriend apps used an average of 2,663 trackers per minute, though that number was driven up by Romantic AI, which called a whopping 24,354 trackers in just one minute of using the app.”

Not-So-OpenAI

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, enter Sora, OpenAI’s new text-to-video generator that uses generative artificial intelligence to instantly create short videos based on written commands.

“OpenAI’s Sora isn’t the first of its kind,” said The Columbian. “Google, Meta and the startup Runway ML are among companies that have demonstrated similar technologies.

“…Although Sora’s abilities have astounded observers…anxiety over ethical and societal implications of AI-generated video uses also remains.”

Especially in an election year and given the fact that “tech companies are still calling the shots when it comes to governing AI and its risks as governments around the world work to catch up. In December, the European Union reached a deal on the world’s first comprehensive AI rules, but the act won’t take effect until two years after final approval.”

A lifetime in tech…

“We are working with red teamers — domain experts in areas like misinformation, hateful content, and bias — who will be adversarially testing the model,” (OpenAI) wrote. “We’re also building tools to help detect misleading content such as a detection classifier that can tell when a video was generated by Sora.”

Again, we know how that turns out when we leave it to the foxes to guard the hen house, especially given that, to date, “OpenAI has revealed limited information about how Sora was built. OpenAI’s technical report did not disclose what imagery and video sources were used to train Sora.”

It’s the End of the Web as We Know It, the Wall Street Journal warned, not in reference to Sora but rather AI-powered ‘answer engines,’ that are “changing how we use the web at the same time that it floods the world with questionable content.”

“Search has so dominated our information-seeking behaviors that few of us ever think to question it anymore.

“But AI is changing all of that, and fast. A new generation of AI-powered “answer engines” could make finding information easier, by simply giving us the answers to our questions rather than forcing us to wade through pages of links. Meanwhile, the web is filling up with AI-generated content of dubious quality. It’s polluting search results, and making traditional search less useful.”
Nor are people going back to the source, for the fuller story, which is a nightmare for the publishers without whom the content would not be available, and advertisers who are supporting publishers.

“Without traffic, the business model for many publishers—of providing useful, human-generated information on the web—could collapse,” said the Journal.

And who wins (again) at the end of the day? Hint: not you.

Even more dystopian, if that’s your cuppa: Open AI’s SORA Unlocks Unlimited Entertainment No One Can Afford, with the author warning that AI is coming for every profession, including entertainment, and that’s where we beg to differ, using history as our yardstick and the decimation of the censorial mainstream media, which gave rise to alternative news sites and alternative livestreaming platforms. YouTube may be the #1 platform in its space – so far –  but far from owns the space.

And therein lies the GenAI Achilles Heel. One need only look back at the era of the lockdowns to find it: people will agree to be locked in an artificial world for just so long – if at all.

Did telemedicine permanently replace doctor visits?

Did Amazon (et al) delivery permanently drive all stores out of business?

We’re constantly being reminded that software is eating the world, and while AI is promising to consume an even bigger part of it, we’re wondering if tech is getting to the point where they’re attempting to bite off more than they can chew As the Journal pointed out, “For now, it’s strictly early adopters who are handing over seemingly every aspect of their lives to these AIs and we’ll see how far that goes or how long it lasts considering “early adopters are RETURNING the Apple Vision Pro as users complain about three problems including headaches.”

Again, tech didn’t consider humans in the equation, but no surprises there: how long have we been told that we’re the product, after all.

It may well be that with all their latest and greatest ‘innovations,’ –  the idea that software eating the world aside –  we wonder if people are simply finally losing their appetites for it all. Onward and forward.