AI will make you unable to remember the past as it was

Every year since 2008, Google celebrates its Google I/Oan annual conference for developers, but this year, due to the pressure unleashed on the development of the Generative Artificial Intelligencewas not about Google I/O but of Google AI.

Creating a four-word claim email.

When the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichaitook the stage, stated that "we are reimagining all of our core products, including search.", referring to the incorporation of AI in all of them. And he showed it through a complete demonstration, where, for example, the Generative AI within Gmail could write an elaborate mail to an airline to help obtain a refund. Or the new Google Photos Magic Editor was able to remove unwanted itemsThe following are some of the most important features to be considered: changing the position of people and objects in the photographs, making the sky bluer, and generally adjusting the lighting of the images to make them more attractive to the viewer. retouching to look naturalWhat do you want the AI in Google Docs to write a cover letter to go with your resume, or create a complete job description from a few words, done?

What if everything wasn't so nice?

So much for the nice way of selling us what AI tools in Google's cloud applications are going to make our lives easier, kind of like what the neural filters (which is what Adobe calls its AI) in Photoshop. But if you give it a slight thought (not a brainy one, the kind that leaves you shuddering), you realize that there are two sides to everything.

Yes, you can write an email almost automatically putting four instructions and it will look like you are writing like a literary man, but .... on the other side, if you, the user, have the capacity to do that, what do you think the company that will read your mail will have. Surely another AI that will read and automatically reply to your email like today's frustrating automated answering machines that ask you to say very clear things into the phone to guide you... usually, nowhere.

And of this Google knows a lot, already at the pre-pandemic 2018 Google I/O the company. presented Duplexshowing how Google Assistant could make automated calls without letting people know they were interacting with an AI. 

Not only will you be able to use AI-based tools, but also the others.

So, in a while, when you write an email of claim, complaint, request for refund... in general of anything to a company, most likely no human will ever read it. The company's AI mail system (most likely from Microsoft/OpenAI through Microsoft 365) will talk to your Gmail AI, and so they'll be in an eternal loop, while you think you've set a process in motion with four words in a prompt(how modern you will feel! son of your time!).

Was that as the photo shows, or is it all fake?

And when you go to look at the photos from last year's trip, there you will see blue skiesA splendorous sun, your smiling face (and maybe looking 10 years younger than you really were last year). When actually it was pouring rain that dayYou hadn't slept, you had dark circles under your eyes that reached your chin, and you were pouting because you had just had an argument with your partner. But thanks to that pathology (?) of to always want to embellish the photos that we take out, not accepting the reality of the momentyou will have clicked on the "beautify"Google Photos and your memories won't be real. They will be invented. You will alter your present every day without realizing it.. You will be erasing your real present, turning it into an imaginary past.

The AI will make us have to decide to what level we give up control of our life and memories.

The software tools that we work with, or have fun with, on a daily basis are incorporating new technological advancesthanks to the Deep Learningwhich result in the automatic content generationeither of text, visual or sound. Not bad. It is progress. But to accept its use without thinking about the consequences, or how it can negatively affect us, is irresponsible. Both individual and corporate irresponsibility.

Trivialities such as writing an email, or altering a photo we have taken with our cell phone seem inconsequential.... but our day-to-day life, our reality, is made up of moments, instants, inconsequential. To remain without control over them, Is it not the same as losing control over ourselves? Without realizing it. Subtly. As so many things fall. Without realizing it.

Cover photo by Adrian Swancar