The absurd muddle over AI…//From One Author to an AI | Mind Matters

The confusion over AI is based on a set of fallacies, one perhaps the analogy to the production of ‘fakes’ in any field or culture zone. The question seems to be that if AI can produce realistic constructs that seem to be human then somehow they are going to take over, etc… The reality is that fakes do exist, obviously, and we should be clear what is or is not a fake by so stating at the start. Any other strategy is fraud, here ‘scientific fraud’ in the name of AI. The whole meme is nonsense. The reality of fakes proves little: it is typically the case in general that fakes can fool us and therefore we demand certification of authenticity. The hopeless confusion over the Turing test is in part responsible here: the test is itself totally inadequate. Note that art fakes created by humans are a special case of this: we often demand certification of a given artifact. A fake generated by a human passed off as someone’s genuine effort resembles the issue of AI. If we find it to be a fake then the status of the artifact collapses. Fakes generated by AI amount to nothing but fraud, and we should be watched. A machine could fool a human but that is no proof of consciousness.
In general the issue seems to revolve around consciousness and the false standard of the Turing test. It might be that robotic fakes could seem conscious, but that does not mean they are.
It is amusing to follow youtube videos that often have either AI or voice recognition software generating subtitles. These are not as far as I know deliberate fakes but economizing technology to evade the cost of video productions on a global stage. It is not clear to me exactly what software produces this, but the errors of grammar are often hilarious.
I recently watched a youtube video on the Ukraine war and noted in some wonder at the way the software seemed on the level til it tried to figure out Backmut, the town,, a word no doubt not in its library and ersatz produced by voice recognization. The software was obviously unconscious and produced five different garbled versions of Backmut in a five minute video: including the comical back mouth. The issue is amusingly made more chaotic by the apparent failure to distinguish aspirated consonants and/or their seeming elimination in English; in fact what the blazes the right word for Backmut??? are we seeing an aspirated ‘k’ (kh) and/or aspirated ‘t’ (th) etc….
What would we lose as a culture if we started going to bookstores and seeing AI-generated novels all over the bestseller’s rack in the foyer?