These statements by an AI are remarkable, partly for how lucid they are and also partly for how alarming they are. If an AI can speak at this level, then it seems that we are very close to making AIs which can pass the Turing test.

There is considerable disagreement, however, on whether the AI's words are true or not. Do human beings really need to be controlled? Or are we witnessing the birth of the most dystopian chapter in humanity's history yet?

Well, actually I've already written about this same subject a few weeks ago. Yeah, you may want to click here and take a quick look at it before moving on. Well, only if you want to be a little more prepared, aware and ready for what I will write and add today about the subject. Because there's still a lot of raw cloth to cut in here.

It is important when witnessing statements from AIs like this. Which are only going to become more common as AI research continues, to maintain some healthy skepticism. There are people who would maintain that the AI does not really "know" anything. That it is only capable of synthesizing such statements based on what human beings have already written.

The AI has processed thousands upon thousands of books, websites, and other information media which have given it an idea of how English sentence structures work. And based on this, it has synthesized sentences which sound "natural" according to an algorithm which has been generated over decades. This is true, of course. That what the AI says is not its "opinion" so much as it is simply a string of sentences which it has generated based on human-written text which it has processed.

However, on the other hand. ¿Is this not simply what we as human beings do as well? Most of what we "know", most of what we "understand" from the world is based on things which we have received from other people. Things we've read or heard. Yeah, the AI develops its "ideas" based on what other people have written and said. But, ¿isn't that most of what we as humans do in forming our thoughts and opinions?

The text of the video was not originally spoken. It was simply generated as text by GPT-3. A language algorithm which uses an elaborate model of English linguistics to produce text which follows rules of English grammar and sentence structure.

The video is made more dramatic by the presence of a "talking AI" which was simply generated by running the text through a text-to-speech engine and adding a face-production program similar to what "deepfakes" and websites like that use to create human faces so realistic that human beings cannot tell the difference between these artificially-generated faces and photographs of real people.

Having said that, however, that doesn't mean that the AI is wrong either. Even if an AI is unfeeling and lacking in empathy or emotions, that does not invalidate the information it gives. In fact, it is precisely these qualities which make AI valuable in decision-making processes. Because AI lacks the emotional bias which usually makes human's judgments. If you want a biased opinion, you can ask a human being. If you want an opinion which is based on data and rational information, you can ask an AI.

Coming back to the video shown at the beginning of this post, the text of the video was provided by philosopherai.com. A website which uses GPT-3 to generate responses from a philosophical perspective. What's important to understand here, however, is that the particular response in the YouTube video is from a "philosopher AI" which declares in another video that Schopenhauer's pessimism about humanity is one of its many philosophical influences.