Year-Ender 2025: The Imitation Game And The Rise Of AI |
In June this year a band calling them- selves The Velvet Sundown burst into cyberspace. They brought out three albums in quick succession, crawling up the earphone cords of over a million lis- teners. Its fanbase had no clue that they weren't listening to humans, rather Al trained on human artists. It's an Al band; their biographies, photographs, songs all produced at the click of a button. When the jig was up. the fans were outraged and a trifle embarrassed that they couldn't call out the synthetic soundscape.
The march of Al science is unstop- pable, unrelenting and unobjectively terrifying. Al has deeply permeated every facet of 4 life, quietly working behind the scenes in the fields of medicine. engineering, production lines as well as outright brazenly in creative professions like art, writing and music. With the increasing dependency on AI to navigate life from asking ChatGPT for advice, writing a resume to generating ideas, summarising articles, there's no escape. And it is this year that Al has cemented itself as a necessity while breaking the tether of what it means to be fundamentally human.
AI works by training itself on pre-existing data. From the words on the pages of your favourite books to a painting that evokes a strong emotion or a song you like to listen to. It collects these little factoids of information, amalgamating it and regurgitating a hollow imitation-in seconds. What makes this so popular is that it opens a doorway to those who want to create something out of nothing without effort.
The Studio Ghibli Al controversy earlier........