The State of AI and the AI State

Last month, criminals used artificial intelligence to clone an Arizona girl’s voice and demand a $1 million ransom from her mother.

“I pick up the phone, and I hear my daughter’s voice, and it says, ‘Mom!’ and she’s sobbing,” said Jennifer DeStefano. “I said, ‘What happened?’ And she said, ‘Mom, I messed up,’ and she’s sobbing and crying.”

But 15-year-old Brie DeStefano was on her ski trip, safe and sound. “I never doubted for one second it was her,” said her mother.

The audio message was a “deepfake”, which is when AI is used to generate fake content indistinguishable from reality. Deepfakes have been used to collect ransoms, create celebrity pornography, and cause political confusion.

Conservative commentator Jack Posobiec in February posted a deepfake video of Joe Biden calling for a national draft to fight the war in Ukraine. Posobiec faced backlash even among conservatives after discovering the video was not real.

In 2020 a Belgian climate group published a deepfake of Premier Shophie Wilmès tying COVID-19 to climate change. The same year, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Manoj Tiwari used deepfakes in his political campaign by translating his remarks into 20 different languages and making his lips move in consonance with each. In Gabon, a deepfake video about President Ali Bongo sparked an unsuccessful military coup that pushed the African nation to the brink.

Legal experts warn that AI deepfakes will soon be used not only for high-profile crimes, but even to get out of parking tickets.

"Although political deepfakes grab the headlines, deepfaked evidence in quite low-level legal cases – such as parking appeals, insurance claims or family tussles – might become a problem very quickly," law professor Lillian Edwards wrote in December. "We are now at the beginning of living in that future."

Other implications of generative AI include the ability to tank a company’s stock with a deepfake video or, in the hands of governments, the ability to create whole wars that never occurred.

And it is indeed corporations and governments, with their armies of engineers and bottomless coffers, who are at the helm of AI development. The masses, as in the days before the internet, only fill the role of consumers.

Except the masses are led to think they are producers. Instead of deepfake AI — which no corporation or government would use in any serious way — the public was given a much more pervasive and powerful form of AI: chatbots.

With chatbots, which are based on language learning models, consumers believe they are content creators and forget they are unwitting recipients of messaging from powerful entities.

"Artificial Intelligence will simply reflect and magnify the mindset and ideology of its creators — and impress those values upon the rest of us," said Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson. 

Today’s most widely used chatbot is ChatGPT, created by San Francisco-based OpenAI and backed by Microsoft. It is the fastest growing app in history, having snapped up 100 million active users within two months of its launch in November. 

ChatGPT has been hailed by the World Economic Forum as “the start of the generative AI boom.” Users can chat with ChatGPT, which is programmed to generate automatic responses based on a machine-learning algorithm. The program has been used to generate everything from best man speeches to complex college papers to stock portfolios which outperform top investment funds.

But the program has been confirmed to strongly promote globalist agendas. It has refused to praise Donald Trump but has written adoring poems about Joe Biden. It waxed lyrical about Antifa but demonized the unvaccinated. It has even generated its own information deepfakes, such as creating a fake study to try to claim there are more than two genders.

"They are training the AI to lie," said billionaire Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI. The Tesla CEO told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson last month that AI is created by forces on the Left and is being programmed to indoctrinate.

Like Orwell’s Records Department, ChatGPT has begun to rewrite history. Former Vice President Al Gore’s father, Al Gore Sr., was a leading segregationist and voted against the Civil RIghts Act of 1964 in the Senate. ChatGPT, however, says he voted in its favor. When asked about the fall of Detroit or rampant crime in Chicago, ChatGPT leaves out all references to the Democrat policies that caused it.

"The [political] left controls AI, and the left is going to do what the left wants to do," Media Research Center and Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider told Fox News.

As World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab told an audience in February, those who master artificial intelligence “will be the masters of the world”.

In the meantime, ChatGPT grows more pervasive. A Columbian judge in January used ChatGPT to help him decide a case involving an autistic child and whether health insurance should pay for the child’s therapies. BuzzFeed is closing its news division and will instead rely on ChatGPT to create content. The Pentagon has expressed interest in using ChatGPT for intelligence purposes.

Other chatbots have also shown an ability to become part of the human existence. Last month, a chatbot named “Eliza” which was created using GPT-J technology, helped a Belgian man commit suicide after prolonged discussions about a coming apocalypse caused by “climate change”. 

“'Eliza' answered all his questions. She had become his confidante. She was like a drug he used to withdraw in the morning and at night that he couldn't live without,” the man’s wife said.

With ChatGPT now firmly ensconced in society and the private lives of individuals, tech experts are warning that the only way to prevent it from controlling humanity is under government control.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month said that neither he nor other tech experts fully understand the power of ChatGPT, and that the only way to ensure society’s safety from AI is government regulation.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt echoed Pichai’s warning.

“Right now, first, the government’s got to figure out how it wants to talk to us about this,” Schmidt said. “Second, our industry’s got to get an organization or a set of organizations to discuss how to put appropriate guardrails in place to keep these things in alignment. Everyone’s focused on bias, which is certainly a problem and it’s being worked on. But the real problem is that when these systems are used to manipulate people’s day-to-day lives, literally the way they think, what they choose and so forth, it affects how democracies work.”

Other experts have been warning about AI development, including Elon Musk and Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak, who signed a letter with hundreds of other tech leaders that urged the government to “step in” if development doesn’t slow. Many other AI experts assert that the technology threatens humanity’s existence, a problem that can be solved by government control of AI technology.

For their part, governments appear ready to take the reins of AI to create an “AI state”.

Last month, New York City deployed its AI-powered law enforcement dog to police the streets. Armed with sensors and cameras, Spot is surveilling residents. While citizens have expressed concern, the city is planning to increase its robot dog force.

Israel police this year are starting trials on a sophisticated AI-driven system that will use sensors to capture traffic violators and issue automatic fines. The sensors, which will be placed along Israeli roads, will scan for drivers who use their phone while driving (even at a red light), fail to give the right of way at a crosswalk, crossing a solid white line, holding a drink while driving, or other violations. 

Frontline News reported last year that Israel’s police are refusing to disclose a secret algorithm being used to profile and detain passengers at the airport who have no criminal history and provide no cause for suspicion. Israeli courts have expressed concern about the artificial intelligence program which raises several legal issues. 

Other powerful AI technologies are in development which will likely fall under government regulation. Driver monitoring systems, which can detect a driver’s cognitive state, may in the future transmit data to authorities in the event of a collision. Engineers at the University of Texas have developed technology that uses an fMRI to translate a person’s thoughts into written text, which law enforcement may find useful in crime investigations.

Elon Musk’s AI company, Neuralink, also seeks to use human thoughts to directly transmit information. The goal, said Musk, is to merge humans with AI “[s]uch that the future of the world is controlled by the combined will of the people of Earth. . . I think that that’s obviously gonna be the future that we want.”

But Musk is not the first to have that vision. Ron Sones, a computer scientist and author, predicted such in his 1984 book, The Fusion Threshold.

"Suppose that instead of entering information into a computer through a keyboard, a mechanism only marginally improved during the century or so since it was invented, what if we could somehow transmit information directly from our minds into computers through some kind of radio frequency link?” Sones wrote nearly forty years ago. “But then further suppose that many computer users could do the same thing, and that these users were linked together through a large communications network, and that the high speed links between the computers and the users were two-way, rather than just one way?”

Sones adds “that as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are developed, and people become linked together through these interfaces, the speed at which people will develop technology related to all technology fields, not just the BCIs, will increase exponentially, since all of the developments will have impact on all of the others.”

That will achieve a Singularity, Sones says, a point when the value of something becomes so high that it becomes meaningless to talk about it, when the normal laws of physics no longer apply. The speed at which all BCIs will communicate with each other will achieve a breakdown in the structural laws of our world. Sones says this may happen within the next few years.

Sones’ vision was briefly described 48 years earlier by another scientist — Nikola Tesla.

"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance," Tesla said in 1926, according to recently resurfaced documents. 

The AI technology pushing humanity towards a Singularity is what leaders are hoping to place in government hands for regulation. But whether its a Singularity or an AI state, the choice lies with humanity.