The Global Rise in Artificial Intelligence

By B. Sapoznik

If you unlock your phone and enter any of the many famous social media applications, it’s almost certain that at some point, you’ll find a video related to AI. Sometimes, they’re ads – marketing and demonstrating an AI tool. Others, however, are videos completely produced by AI tools, with the occasional helping human hand to navigate the programs to create an intuitive video. The global community has affixed to AI almost like a drug, and its widespread pointless use is infecting the world, day by day. It has been a topic that we were all aware existed previously, but it was almost like a switch flipped, and suddenly everyone became so attached to it; so viciously addicted to the laziness of “making AI generate it for me”.


It is impossible to talk about AI without stating the largest technological celebrity of the past year: ChatGPT. The project was released on November 30th, 2022, and is continuously being developed by OpenAI as more and more users ask questions daily and feed it with data. The basic pillars in which ChatGPT (3.5) lies are known as the artificial neural network, which is the digital system by which Artificial Intelligence becomes intelligent. Basically, there are different inputs given to an AI, and so through different processes and research (neural network), the AI outputs processed information.


The main difference between ChatGPT and the outdated AI tools available in the 2010s is that OpenAI’s usage of processes in neural networks became much more reliable. The increased funding for research caused improved neural networks, which got better and better once more information and raw data were given to analyse. For instance, the amount of data given to process and study ChatGPT 3.0 was about 570GB of data, a number which has grown for the ChatGPT successors (3.5 and 4). Overall, the large investment made more research, development, and data accessible to develop the language models.


The largest difference between the ChatGPT versions is their versatility. Even with ChatGPT 3.5’s incredible processing, the variety of different tools incorporated into ChatGPT 4.0 made its growth become exponential, always ‘feeding it’ new sets of data. Eventually, the larger investment, research, testing, and ‘feeding’ of different language models catalysed the development of different AI tools. Nowadays, AI is everywhere. It went from a powerful testing tool to a practicality in everyday life. The development of AI in the international population is truly fascinating, as it is now used for corrections, image generation, image correction, sound creation, video generation, and many other purposes – all derived from the ‘antique’ purpose of generating a simple text. Of course, we have to be careful – these language models are continuously in training and development, therefore there is still a considerable presence of ‘hallucinations’ and everyday errors where AI tools drift off into their own neural network calculations, ignoring the given data.


With the popular global immersion into AI, a sizeable sentiment of fear has lay upon the world. The augmented development of AI is becoming almost unrecognisable, thus showing everyone that AI might take up most jobs. If mastered to perfection, a robot can do everything a human can do, but better, as there is no margin for technical error. The flaws seen in modern AI tools are all sourced from their code, not their ability to follow it. If all codes are perfectly amended, there are probably no jobs that can escape from AI’s domain. Even so, AI might even develop itself, creating a possibility of a dystopian future where AI is better than us. Elon Musk has previously shown interest in the concept of UBI (Universal basic income), which would grant humans a basic income policy independent of any factors (unconditional), which would still make the human economy and lifestyle exist after a supposed rule of AI, if it were to replace the human race.


In summary, AI has been catalysed in modern times by investment, research, and development – a process that has led to the creation of a variety of specific AI tools. Even with modern mistakes in AI code, there is an expectancy that AI will still develop in the future, possibly threatening the use of the human race.