The Killer App of the Information Age

Cancer cells use glucose and other nutrients from one's body to grow, spread, and eventually kill the person. If one starves them of these nutrients, could the disease stop spreading or even reverse?

- VANITA KOHLI-KHANDEKAR

That thinking is driving much research into the use of fasting to stop cancer. It is also the logic media and entertainment firms are using in their fight against artificial intelligence's (AI's) appropriation of their work.

Much like cancer, generative AI gets its "intelligence" from everything that has been published, written, recorded and available online and offline. Without all the knowledge, information, music, films, books, newspapers, there would be nothing to train the AI. That is why the cheer around it seems fantastic.

In a world where information and knowledge is the fuel that runs entire economies, we are happily giving the collective knowledge of humankind to a handful of companies. These firms then sell or offer the same knowledge in bits and pieces through apps or summaries to us.

There is an inherent conflict of interest here. AI is destroying the very thing that it is feeding on. A senior publisher told me recently that he can train an AI tool to write like, say, Salman Rushdie or Ian McEwan. Why on earth should Mr Rushdie, or for that matter anybody doing original work, bother to create anything then? If all creators did that, what would it mean for the "development" of AI?

Imagine a world where human beings have stopped producing anything original and are completely dependent on AI for knowledge, for the very function of thinking. It is the world of The Matrix, a 1999 film that envisaged human beings as battery cells in an apocalyptic world ruled by machines.