Letter from the Editor: Artificial Intelligence

Almost everyone knows HAL from '2001: A Space Odyssey,' the intelligent and, in the course of the film, increasingly sentient spaceship computer, who, with soft-spoken sangfroid, proceeds to murder the human crew that is supposed to control him. More realistic examples continue the already many decades old automation and mechanisation of labour. Today not only manual but even a range of creative tasks, like illustrating or copywriting, can be replaced by complex machines that render people not only jobless, but their skillset more or less obsolete. There is a third negative scenario that stirs up even deeper existential anxieties, not because computers become more human, but because humans become less unique, more boring, predictable, even mechanical. Using artificial neural networks, AI has the capacity to learn from its mistakes to better predict, as in the case of marketing, a customer's preferences, or, in the case of image generation programs like the popular DALL-E 2, make photorealistic or expressionistic images.