COLM TOBIN: Never mind AI, it's the humans in charge that we need to be worried about

IT’S been a kerraaazzzzzzy time in the tech world. You can’t move for Silicon Valley poster boys getting their knickers in a twist, it seems.

We had the downfall of all downfalls a few weeks back, with the conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried for fraud in a US court. Bankman-Fried had pulled the wool over many eyes, siphoning away billions of dollars of other people’s money from his FTX crypto exchange.

If you are confused when you read about FTX and crypto, don’t worry. I recently read Michael Lewis’s brilliant Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, which gives a brilliant insider account of this rarefied world. But I still didn’t really understand what Bankman-Fried’s company actually did. It seems I am not alone.

In the end, I think it was no different to any other snake oil that has been sold to people through the ages, from Dutch Tulip Mania, to Bernie Madoff’s pyramid schemes, to Bulgarian apartments flogged to unsuspecting taxi drivers at the height of the Celtic Tiger.

Bankman-Fried was a proponent of a growing craze in tech land called ‘effective altruism’, a philosophy that aims to do as much good as possible. In essence, you make as much money as you can make and find ways to make the world a better place with it.

Which sounds great. It's a shame that the result was him squirrelling away billions belonging to other people. Not sure how effectively ‘altruistic’ that was.

That’s the thing with all these philosophies, or cults – it’s all well and good until people’s human nature kicks in.

Effective Altruism reared its head in the news again earlier in the week during the sudden ousting of Sam Altman, the chief executive of Open AI. This is the company that has brought itself to the attention of the world in the past year with its launch of Chat GPT, the large language model that is bringing AI to consumers. (Artificial intelligence, that is, not the AI farmers are more used to. Please God, that won't be the next stage of the tech revolution.)

There isn’t a lot of clarity behind the reason for Altman’s firing, but it is suspected that the disagreement stems from concerns within the company's board about the potential dangers of AI. The company was founded as a not-for-profit. Now that a business model has emerged which could see OpenAI generating billions of dollars with its technology, the mood music has suddenly changed and there seems to be an argument between the effective altruists and the creative capitalists about the future direction of the technology. Good old-fashioned politics dressed up in some fancy new terms.

The controversy took a new turn with Altman being hired by Microsoft immediately and most of the staff in Open AI threatening to walk with him unless reinstated. So it was a good day for Microsoft, who finally might have the firepower to give the lad who offers to help you write a letter a few extra brain cells. If that fecker gets control of the nuclear arsenal, you'd imagine our days are numbered.

The truth is, no matter how many conferences that governments want to hold, or whatever grand statements they wish to make regarding regulating artificial intelligence, the future will be dictated from behind closed doors in Silicon Valley. By nerds.

Don’t make it, fake it

THE big fear is that AI will create a slew of deep fakes and upend the news cycle, creating a Twilight Zone where nobody knows what’s real and what isn’t.

If you want my opinion, the news is daft enough without any help from Borg-like large language models.

Most days, I wonder if I’m actually in a coma somewhere and dreaming up half the things I see on my phone. A few cases in point:

This week, Argentina elected a new prime minister who is a tantric sex expert who talks to his dead dog through a medium. He also wants to legalise selling human organs.

Balenciaga unveiled a £695 skirt that looks exactly like a bath towel. According to Vogue, it will make you look like you just hopped out of the shower. Which was badly needed, right?

Roy Keane is the new king of ‘gorpcore’, apparently, and launched a new line of clothes for Adidas aimed at what I call The Outdoor Da demographic. In a new ad, Keane and his dog are seen wandering around on hills, zooming along in a speedboat and staring out at the horizon, presumably growling to each other about Mick McCarthy.

The ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ singer Shakira settled a long-running tax dispute with Spanish authorities, paying them €7.3m in back taxes. Says you, she should probably get the hips to do the tax returns in future.

And if all this wasn’t enough, it turns out that a musical inspired by Gwyneth Paltrow’s legal battle with a retired optometrist over a ski accident is opening in London next month. Gwyneth Goes Skiing will depict the trial in which Terry Sanderson sued Paltrow for $300,000 earlier this year.

And they are worried about AI undermining the news cycle?