Every few months something like this washes on up our feeds, be it turning yourself into a packaged action figurine<\/a> or a Studio Ghibli character<\/a>. But what makes this latest trend different is that it highlights the personal information that AI holds about us, making it an odd point of pride or status to be \u201cseen\u201d by AI in the same way that one might be \u201cseen\u201d by a psychic or a romance scammer. Those who haven\u2019t fed enough of themselves into Chat GPT are encouraged in how-to guides<\/a> to give more detail about their personal and professional lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n Joshua Yuvaraj is a senior lecturer in law at the University of Auckland, and is interested in the intersections of AI with intellectual property and creativity. He says the trend reveals just how much information we\u2019ve become comfortable with sharing online. \u201cWe\u2019re only at this stage with AI because we\u2019ve been so well-trained by the social media age that our personal information and privacy doesn\u2019t really matter to us any more,\u201d he says. \u201cThe risks of that are considerable, and I don\u2019t know whether people are giving those risks the attention they deserve.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Yuvaraj explains that uploading personal information and photographs to public-facing models like ChatGPT means that data could be used in other ways in future. \u201cFor example, you upload an image onto ChatGPT, that image may well then be used to train the model,\u201d he says. And for those who use AI as a form of therapy and a place to spill personal secrets? \u201cThere\u2019s a risk, however minuscule, that with the right prompt, someone could extract that information and that would breach your privacy as well.\u201d<\/p>\n There are also environmental considerations when it comes to these harmless-looking trends \u2013 AI data centres require enormous amounts of land, power and water for cooling. \u201cOne of the issues is that when we see a ChatGPT screen, you think, \u2018oh, this is magic. I can just do whatever I want on it,\u2019 but we don\u2019t actually think enough about the resources being used.\u201d Yuvaraj encourages people to ask one question of themselves before using AI: \u201cIs the gain of this worth the cost that it\u2019s going to have on the environment?\u201d<\/p>\n Along with the environment, the value of human creativity is another consideration when jumping on AI trends. \u201cEvery use like this pushes us further down a path where it is likely that people will feel even less empowered to create anything when things can be done for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time,\u201d Yuvaraj says. \u201cWhat will we lose when that happens?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\nImages created by asking ChatGPT: \u201ccreate a caricature of me and my job based off what you know about me\u201d<\/p>\n
Joshua Yuvaraj<\/p>\n