When the computer scientist Ben Zhao learned that artists were having their work stolen by A.I. models, he invented a tool to thwart the machines. He also knows how to foil an eavesdropping Alexa and how to guard your online footprint. The big news, he says, is that the A.I. bubble is bursting. SOURCES:Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of economics at Stanford UniversityBen Zhao, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago RESOURCES:"The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI," by Melissa Heikkilä (MIT Technology Review, 2024)"Glaze: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Models," by Shawn Shan, Jenna Cryan, Emily Wenger, Haitao Zheng, Rana Hanocka, and Ben Y. Zhao (Cornell University, 2023)"Nightshade: Prompt-Specific Poisoning Attacks on Text-to-Image Generative Models," by Shawn Shan, Wenxin Ding, Josephine Passananti, Stanley Wu, Haitao Zheng, and Ben Y. Zhao (Cornell University, 2023)"A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going," by Michael Woodridge (2021) EXTRAS:"Nuclear Power Isn’t Perfect. Is It Good Enough?" by Freakonomics Radio (2022)
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There's an old saying that I'm sure you've heard, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But imitation can easily tip into forgery. In the art world, there have been many talented forgers over the years.
The Dutch painter Han van Meegeren, a master forger of the 20th century, was so good that his paintings were certified and sold, often to Nazis, as works by Johan Vermeer, a 17th century Dutch master. Now there is a new kind of art forgery happening and the perpetrators are machines. I recently got back from San Francisco, the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom.
I was out there to do a live show, which you may have heard in our feed, and also to attend the annual American Economic Association Conference. Everywhere you go in San Francisco, there are billboards for AI companies. The conference itself was similarly blanketed.
There were sessions called Economic Implications of AI, Artificial Intelligence and Finance, and Large Language Models and Generative AI. The economist Erik Brynjolfsson is one of the leading scholars in this realm, and we borrowed him for our live show to hear his views on AI.
The idea is that, you know, AI is doing these amazing things, but we want to do it in service of humans and make sure that we keep humans at the center of all of that.
The day after Brynjolfsson came on our show, I attended one of his talks at the conference. It was called Will AI Save Us or Destroy Us? He cited a book by the Oxford computer scientist Michael Wooldridge called A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. Brynjolfsson read from a list of problems that Wooldridge said AI was nowhere near solving. Here are a few of them.
Understanding a story and answering questions about it. Human level automated translation. Interpreting what is going on in a photograph. As Brynjolfsson is reading this list from the lectern, you're thinking, wait a minute, AI has solved all those problems, hasn't it? And that's when Brynjolfsson gets to his punchline. The Wooldridge book was published way back in 2021.
The pace of AI's advance has been astonishing, and some people expect it to supercharge our economy. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated economic growth over the current decade of around 1.5% a year. Erik Brynjolfsson thinks that AI could double that. He argues that many views of AI are either too fearful or too narrow.
Too many people think of machines as just trying to imitate humans. But machines can help us do new things we never could have done before. And so we want to look for ways that machines can complement humans, not simply imitate or replace them.
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