The 142nd Installment
Menace and Vanity by AI Technology

by HUANG Xuping,
Assistant Professor

Human beings are always eager to control the unknown world.

A proof to this is the appearance of artificial intelligence in films in the 2000s. In the movie Resident Evil, the most advanced and high-performance main computer developed by the Umbrella Corporation controls the entire Hive, an underground laboratory. This computer is the central core of the Umbrella, which plots to dominate the world with its T-virus. It is an omniscient being living in an unknown world and appears before the fighter Alice via a hologram in the form of a cute little girl. Not only does it provide information, but it also has a human voice, converses with humans and exerts enormous power.

In the TV series Supergirl, Mom, the cosmic ruler, became a holographic image after her death and continued to support Supergirl by sharing wisdom, emotional comfort and other means. It is truly an extension of intelligence.

Sometimes, imagination is surprisingly useful. As of 2022, All the words that my almost 1-year-and-5-month-old child can say are “Alexa, train, now” besides “mom” and “dad”.

Then, a friendly female smart assistant developed by Amazon recognizes the babbling and plays the train video on YouTube. AI technology has already permeated everyday life.

The voice synthesis technology developed by Google, the lip-sync technology published by MIT, which synchronizes mouth movements with the voice, and the technology for automatic generation of natural human face photos have materialized artificial intelligence. AI-based technologies such as StarGAN and Talking Heads are advancing rapidly at top conferences such as AAAI, IJCAI and NeurIPS.

Although technological advances are good, their application and operation to the real world is not always useful, but sometimes it can be harmful, because it is humans with more complex cranial nervous systems who utilize AI.

One famous scene in the anime, Detective Conan or Case Closed, is when the protagonist, who was infantilized and acts as an elementary school student, uses a bow-tie-type voice transformer to impersonate a private detective Mouri. He needs adult identities to get to the bottom of various mysteries. His impersonation is justified in the cause of justice.

Frankly, abuse of such technologies can pose potentially major risks to society. "Hi, it's me" phone scam, where the scammer personifies others by imitating their voices, has disturbed the common values of the world. Furthermore, a fake video of the US President’s speech was presented at an international conference. This poses a frightening threat to public and private life.

Nevertheless, AI is a double-edged sword that can cut both ways. It can help you talk with the deceased or someone you want to see but cannot by simulating their voice or image. That would serve as a comfort. It all depends on the information ethics.

There remains much to be discussed about information ethics. When new technologies such as gene editing were developed, the medical community established ethical guidelines to prevent the creation of Frankenstein-like monsters.

Now, how about the interpersonal information processing area? The passing between life and death, from the previous life through the future life, has been mentioned and discussed in religious and literary works and in numerous works based dialectical materialism that questions human nature and existence, both in Eastern and Western cultures.

The Buddhist Pure Land Rebirth Mantra recognizes the world through metaphysical and Logos-like thoughts, draws the mind and body close to an abstract being called Sariputra as an extension of the life form beyond death and life, and interprets existence of life agnostically. In short, as we human beings have five senses and interact with others through various sensitivities, we are affected by joy, anger, sorrow and pleasure as long as we live.

The maintenance of a sound personality and stable mental condition depends not only on the physical warmth perceived in one’s interaction with others, but also on the psychological aspects of the living forms, such as learned wisdom and decency. Now, AI has embodied or reproduced the spiritual aspects condescend in the life.

So far, an android closely resembling its creator, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University and an android of Matsuko Deluxe that can even engage in conversation personifying his personality have become a hot topic. It seems as if the time has come when one can create his or her alter ego.

AI also reproduced Hibari Misora’s singing voice for the NHK's annual New Year's Eve music competition in 2019, where her android also appeared, giving the impression that the deceased was resurrected. We are now in an era when AI’s practical application has become accessible to the general public.

At that time, there were arguments for and against it: some said it was heart-touching, while others regarded it as blasphemous. Still, the rapid progress of AI has contributed greatly to human civilization, as technology has made a fictional fantasy a reality. On the other hand, abuses of eroticism gradually emerged. Some people replaced the faces of sensual girls in videos with those of their acquaintances. This is a case where the abuse of technology violates information ethics. The brighter a light becomes, the darker the shadows it casts.

It is not that AI is bad, but it is just that AI was born in a human society where various kinds of evil people run rampant and different views on ethics and morality clash with each other. There are conflicts between good and evil, right and wrong, among AI users. Laws governing crime and fraud involving AI are not yet fully developed. The morality of society is questioned. A similar discussion took place in the medical community when cloning technology was created.

However, cloning technology copies the one and only biological being on a genetic level, whereas what AI copies is copying in the emotional and psychological sense. There is no "medium" in which human rights or personalities are being violated. On the other hand, AI can control people’s minds and thus manipulate them physically.

This concern has also alerted people to military misuse of AI. In February 2022, the US company Freethink Media Inc. released a video titled, Should war robots have “license to kill? The concern is not about the near future, but about cyber-attacks and unmanned attacks by military drones in the ongoing hybrid wars, and about autonomous killer robots developed by AI technology in the even nearer future.

Paul Scharre, author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, appears in the video to address the threat of autonomous lethal weapons, along with visual images. Can robots have reason like humans? Or can robots transcend humans by eliminating their weaknesses?

How should we constrain the dynamic human desires, deceptions and wickedness? Undoubtedly, the gray area is expanding. This is the urgent issue that the information ethics research community is facing.

We primates are the only species that have discussed spirituality, but there is a vast unknown world beyond the infinite, enormous universe, which is far beyond the time and space that we humans can grasp with our intellect. At the very least, we would like to preserve that unknown world as a pure land, create a clean “today” of this information society, and leave it to future generations.