Artificial intelligence: who will write STAT and Indefensible tomorrow?

UPDATE DAY

Even though cracks have been working on artificial intelligence for years, suddenly they panicked and demanded a moratorium.

All you had to do was put in market ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language designed by OpenAI, to make the whole world tremble. Are we right to be afraid of this conversational agent capable of answering all questions, writing, translating and even maintaining a conversation?

Over the weekend, I posed this question to two experts, one in IT, the other in management. Not twos of spades, but engineers with master's degrees. Their explanations of artificial intelligence (which I will simply call AI like those who know it well, which is not my case) are far from reassuring me. One of them compares the situation to the beginning of the nuclear age. This time it's not about material destruction, but about the danger that AI poses to democracy and our way of life.

Thousands of trades and professions are now at risk. Could AI write my columns? Surely, as long as I provide him with some broad outlines. Can AI compose music? Hey! yes, as long as they are given an orientation. Even better, the AI ​​can paint Picassos, Dalis, and Riopelles at will. Paintings that she would make from an analysis of the originals without those who painted them getting the slightest “royalty”. 

THE UNEMPLOYED IN THE FUTURE

Authors, composers, performers, painters and how many other artists believed themselves immune to any possibility of losing their livelihood. Their creative spirit seemed to protect them. Error ! They are now as threatened as dozens of trades during the industrial revolution.  

The interpreters who do the French dubbing of films and series in a foreign language are on the edge of the precipice. In Montreal, there are more than a hundred of them earning a good living as dubbers. Replacing them with AI-designed voices is no longer a problem. It is even the childhood of art. With AI, you can get as many Marc Labrèches as you want. And they will all be as inventive as the original. A nice problem for the next president or the next president of the Union des artistes!

AI INSTEAD OF LUC DIONNE?

Since the huge success of District 31that we owe to Luc Dionne, an author of rare productivity, detective series or those that have a close or distant relationship with crime abound on television. Like series related to medicine or hospitals. Obviously, replacing their authors with AI would be as easy as replacing notaries for wills and real estate transactions. That's not me saying that, but the two savvy engineers I interviewed. For them, there is no doubt that AI can do the work of Luc Dionne!

Such a revolution may seem utopian to you, but it is within reach. The moratorium demanded by the main proponents of AI, including the illustrious Montrealer Yoshua Bengio and major industrialists like Elon Musk, will not change anything. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it's fooling ourselves to believe that we can put our shoulders to the ground, even for only six months.