The filmmaker could not get Tiggy the alien to cooperate. He just needed the glistening brown creature to turn its head. But Tiggy, who was sitting in the passenger's seat of a cop car, kept disobeying. At first Tiggy rotated his gaze only slightly. Then he looked to the wrong side of the camera. Then his skin turned splotchy, like an overripe fruit. The filmmaker was not on a movie set, or Mars. He was sitting at his home computer in Los Angeles using a piece of AI software called FLUX Kontext to generate and regenerate images of the alien, waiting for a workable one to appear. He'd used a different AI tool, Midjourney, to generate the very first image of Tiggy (prompt: "fat blob alien with a tiny mouth and tiny lips"); one called ElevenLabs to create the timbre of Tiggy's voice (the filmmaker's voice overlaid with a synthetic one, then pitch-shifted way up); and yet another called Runway to describe the precise shot he wanted in this scene ("close up on the little alien as they ride in the passenger seat, shallow depth of field").

Employees are submitting sensitive business data and privacy-protected information to large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, raising concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) services could be incorporating the data into their models, and that information could be retrieved at a later date if proper data security isn't in place for the service. In a recent report, data security service Cyberhaven detected and blocked requests to input data into ChatGPT from 4.2% of the 1.6 million workers at its client companies because of the risk of leaking confidential information, client data, source code, or regulated information to the LLM. In one case, an executive cut and pasted the firm's 2023 strategy document into ChatGPT and asked it to create a PowerPoint deck. In another case, a doctor input his patient's name and their medical condition and asked ChatGPT to craft a letter to the patient's insurance company. And as more employees use ChatGPT and other AI-based services as productivity tools, the risk will grow, says Howard Ting, CEO of Cyberhaven.

Suppose that Elon Musk opts to develop a generative AI ChatGPT knockoff, what does this foretell and ... [ ] is a presumed "TruthGPT" even possible to build? There is a knock at the cabin door. Should we open the door? Movies usually suggest that we ought to not let our curiosity get the better of us, namely we should absolutely positively never open the door. Well, that being said, opting to leave the door closed wouldn't seem to make for much of a worthy tale. Seems like we are drawn toward excitement and the unknown. So, let's go ahead and open the door. In this particular case, I am referring to some emerging scuttlebutt within the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that either portends good times ahead or the worst of times for all of us. The situation potentially entails the future of AI. And one might solemnly speculate ergo that the future of AI encompasses quite dramatic repercussions all told, including ostensibly shaping the future of society and the fate of humankind. According to recent news reports, Elon Musk, the at-times richest person in the world, has been fishing around for top-notch AI researchers to come on board with a new AI venture that he has in mind. Various AI developers and AI scientists are quietly being approached. The knock on their door apparently provides great promise and potentially lucrative tidings.

Can generative AI ChatGPT really serve as a mirror into humanity? Mirror, mirror, on the wall -- humans are the brightest of them all! That isn't of course a proper quotation from the famed Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but I opted to leverage the contrivance for a handy purpose. The matter has to do with how humankind sees itself when looking in an all-seeing all-telling mirror. Are we the cat's meow? Do we stand tall above all else? The reason I bring this up has to do with a topic that at first glance might seem afield of the weighty matters underlying how humankind perceives its place in the cosmos. I am going to tie these big-time vexing questions about life, our existence, and humanity all told to the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some are insisting that the latest in AI can serve as a mirror into the soul of humanity. Yikes, do we want this? Maybe we won't like what we see. On the other hand, perhaps we have to stiffen our resolve and use AI to see us as we really are. Like a bucket of ice-cold water, AI might be the right thing at the right time to shock us into realizing who we are and where we are going.

Attempts to ban generative AI such as ChatGPT are not all they are cracked up to be. To ban, or not to ban, that is the question. I would guess that if Shakespeare were around nowadays, he might have said something like that about the recent efforts to ban the use of a type of AI known as Generative AI, which is especially exemplified and popularized due to an AI app called ChatGPT. Some high-profile entities have been attempting to ban the use of ChatGPT. For example, the New York City (NYC) Department of Education recently announced that they were proceeding to block access to ChatGPT on its various networks and connected devices. The reported rationale for the ban consisted of indications that this AI app and the overall use of generative AI seemingly portend negative consequences for student learning. Students that opt to use ChatGPT are said to be undercutting the development of their crucial critical-thinking skills and undermining the growth of their problem-solving abilities. On top of those rather stoutly worrisome qualms, there is the undisputed fact that such AI can produce inaccurate outputs that contain errors and other factual maladies. The dangerous icing on the cake is the imagined possibility that the outputs could potentially be used in an unsafe manner by students that unknowingly rely upon said falsehoods. No such documented harms have yet surfaced that I've seen, so we'll need to just take at face value that this could potentially happen (I have discussed the range of possibilities in my postings; for example, some have posited that generative AI essays could tell someone to take medicines that they should not be taking or provide mental health advice that ought to be proffered by human mental health professionals, etc.).