QUICK TAKE: AI is a paradigm shift
This is not to do with Spain so much, although Spain will be hit by it, or will be able to take advantage of it in some way, like every other country in the world. But I’ve been reading much more about AI over the past few days and listening to things and doing some thinking. The genie is already out of the bottle and it’s not going back in. When Microsoft put GPT-4 in the Edge browser on desktop or on Edge/Copilot on smart phones a few weeks ago, everyone on the planet already got access to the top current OpenAI model.
The AI steamroller is going to revolutionise everything related to communication, media, collective messaging, marketing, journalism, fact checking, translation, dubbing, public relations, spin, social media and content creation, even before we get into other uses in other fields, whether that be education, agriculture, medicine or strategic or analytical thinking of any kind. GPT can now talk to itself. You can use it to brainstorm complex narrative ideas about difficult scenarios. An AI tool just dubbed Milei’s WEF speech, in Spanish, into English, giving him a credible accent and syncing his lips in English. Every company that survives is going to need a Chief AI Officer or some such role, just to work out what is going on and how value might be created.
What do we do, in every country, Spain included, when the public communications sphere is flooded with unheard of amounts of AI generated content that is of such a high resolution that it will be impossible to tell reality from fakes? It will be akin to Putin’s Russia on steroids in terms of disinformation, confusion and lack of trust. What do countries do with the socio-economic implications of that? What are the policy options supposed to be? How are the media supposed to hold politicians to account? How is journalism supposed to happen at all in that environment? What do we do about the new digital AI wealth divide that will appear? Reading and thinking about this over the past few weeks over Christmas and into the New Year feels like reporting the pandemic in the weeks before everyone reacted. What should you be doing to learn this and adapt today?
I think it partly depends on how the world embraces it. Sure, a lot of it will happen regardless, but one report I read recently suggested that we will have AI doctors and hairdressers, for example. Personally I would not allow a scissor -bearing robot anywhere near my head, neither would I talk to or be treated by an AI doctor. Humanity needs to stand up, stop being lazy and take some responsibility.
We have the ability to say no, and when you learn to say no, it's truly liberating.