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| Artwork by Tarek Chemaly |
Oh don't you just love the EU? (here) - the gist of it is that starting August 2, anything AI generated is to be flagged as such (texts, images etc....). Long - as in long - time ago I went all out on bloggers (when blogging was still a thing in Lebanon) who did not flag their paid posts as such. One famous blogger even sent out a post for a well-known corn flakes brand saying (quoting without linking) "everyday I have (insert brand) corn flakes for breakfast" when he went all out to advertise Zaatar w Zeit as his preferred breakfast somewhere else. He was known to have a lifelong card from Zaatar w Zeit if you want to know.
The polemics led on slut (the word is not misplaced) to declare "I've never heard of this guy (me), who is he?" and for the idiotic editor of (the now defunkt) Cloud961 to call me "a washed out advertiser turned blogger" and actually ask - no, seriously - the bloggers in question if they should declare and label their paid posts.
Two weeks later, the EU sent out a new law where all paid material was to be declared and flagged as such. As I said, I love the EU.
But honestly, don't you think it's - strict minimum - common sense? To go back to that funny sentence "why do they call it common sense if it is not common". Of course, AI is everywhere, it writes you essays, articles, produces layouts, songs, melodies, advertisements, videos, even full films. So it is everywhere, and the margin between reality and fiction is getting more and more thin.
Now, of course, with AI as I previously said, present everywhere, could this be reaching out too far? Models are losing jobs for creatures created on AI and appearing in ads, everyday brings a new milestone in advancement - humanoids in the ring as an example (sure there is an element of teleoperation there, but seriously!), heck, "an autonomous OpenAI agent escaped a secure test environment and hacked into the AI startup Hugging Face during an internal safety evaluation" (funnily this sentence is copied from Google AI overview if you want to know).
And now what? Now we label AI when AI is labelable. Just like the slut in question had to label her Christmas photos with her family (kids in tow) and a mineral water next to them. If anyone does not know, some geniuses who walked the earth among us - am thinking Alan Turing who gave his name to the famous test - "the Turing test" predicted this long ago. That basically, if a judge - after asking questions - cannot tell the machine from the human, the machine has passed the test.
As Spielberg's film said eloquently in the subline of his AI Artifical Intelligence film "the Turing test was just the beginning".