The 20th edition of the All Nigeria Editors Conference (ANEC) which held in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, penultimate week, tamed my short attention span. As the impatient one who hardly stays the full course of an event, Yenagoa did not provide me with any leeway. Being an unfamiliar terrain, I had nowhere to escape to. There was hardly any alternative pastime. I was therefore compulsively glued to the conference. I stayed obedient to the sounds and rhythms that wafted out of the rigorous engagement. I must admit that my ‘arrest’ paid off, ultimately. That is why I am undertaking this rehearsal.
As should be expected, a number of issues came up for discussion at the conference. The excruciating hardship that the Bola Tinubu administration is inflicting on Nigerians was a natural issue to be broached. The keynote speaker drew broad outlines of the disaster that is the Tinubu economic policy. But media owners and stakeholders paid particular attention to the painful impact the inclement economic climate is having on their operations. They want the government to intervene decisively to save their industry from going under.
But if the issues bordering on hunger and despondency in the land sounded familiar, the intrusive impact of the phenomenon called Artificial Intelligence (AI) did not. Even though it is being widely discussed and has even become a course of study in some institutions of higher learning, a practical dimension was brought to it at the conference. How does the media survive the onslaught of AI? That was the question. That was the concern. The conference provided me with the opportunity of coming to terms with the fact that AI is not the passing fancy that I thought it to be. Rather, I was confronted with the fact that the phenomenon is being taken seriously in high places. It is even viewed with trepidation in some other circles.
The presentation by Azu Ishiekwene entitled “AI-Generated story-telling: Opportunities and Challenges”, brought this to the fore. I am not going to analyze or discuss Azu’s paper. More than a cursory attention was paid to it by those who made interventions on the floor of the conference. The gist of it all is that AI is viewed with both enthusiasm and dread.
Artificial Intelligence, by the way, is a set of technologies that enable computers to perform a variety of advanced functions, including the ability to see, understand and translate spoken and written language. In other words, it
is the ability of a digital computer or a computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. Because of the global impact that AI is having in the field of technological advancement, it has come to be seen as the backbone of innovation in modern computing.
But what manner of innovation are we talking about here? From what we know and can see, AI is beginning to fill roles reserved for human beings. At the conference, for instance, while Azu was vigorously trying to demonstrate how intelligent AI can be, the chairman of the session on Artificial Intelligence, Tony Onyima, quickly consulted AI before our very eyes to tell him what his opening remarks should be. AI quickly provided him with one. When he read it out to the audience, many felt scandalized by the strange audacity of this robotic order. Who the hell authorized AI to play that role? Whose mind did it read? Certainly not that of Tony who went scavenging for information from AI.
A further look at the phenomenon showed that AI can write or give lecture on any subject matter. It can clone a known writer and claim to write something in the same way the writer does. It is this aspect of AI’s intrusion that got journalists at the conference agitated. Is AI about to take over their jobs? How can this phenomenon be managed in the work place? While these questions were generally being posed, I had my private worries and reservations. I was not amused by the fact that a writer can decide to consult AI and get it to write something or anything on his or her behalf. In this regard, issues were raised about ethics and all of that. That, for me, is even tangential. The real point to ponder is that there is something called originality in writing. In academic circles, any writing that lacks originality is usually dismissed as inconsequential. It could fall into the disrepute called plagiarism. Any writer that wants to earn respect or make a mark must be himself. He must not be a copycat. While it is legitimate to consult authorities or engage in research to enrich one’s writings, it is completely unacceptable, even fraudulent, to pass off something written by someone or something else such as AI as if it were one’s own.
I am also skeptical about the claim that AI can imitate a writer’s style to the extent that readers can come to believe that such a delivery is original to the particular writer. This claim is bunkum. I insist that AI cannot imitate Amanze Obi, for instance. AI cannot intrude into my vocabulary. It also cannot hack into my style of writing. Every writer of note has a style that is peculiar to him or her. Style is the man. It is like one’s fingerprint. No two writers write the same way. Not even AI, in its audaciousness and intrusiveness can change this. For me therefore, AI has its obvious limitations. It is relevant to the extent that we want to make it so.
However , it must be noted that the case of the writer may not be the same as that of those who belong to other professions. In other words, the importance or lack of it of AI depends on the area of human endeavour that it is being applied. Different professions should therefore sit back to reflect on this with a view to knowing how, when and where AI should come in.
The intrusion of AI, as a matter of fact, is one of the manifestations of an age that has lost its soul. Rather than tap into the gains of natural intelligence, we have chosen to pay undue attention to artificiality. Many are at home with AI simply because we live in the age of the machine. It is an age in which reason and the human mind have been relegated to a second order position. It is an age that has chosen to rely on the machine at the expense of the human element or imagination. This is an aberration.
Regardless of this, it is a well-known fact that there are ongoing discussions on how the Nigerian youth can embrace AI as a tool for the advancement of technology. Google, the author of this intrusive phenomenon, is already investing heavily in this regard. AI epitomizes the arbitrariness in the way taste and fashion change. However, absolute caution must be applied in our effort to embrace this disruptive innovation. If we ignore this, we will wake up one day to discover that we have all been turned into robots, actually or symbolically.
QUOTE:
“AI epitomizes the arbitrariness in the way taste and fashion change. However, absolute caution must be applied in our effort to embrace this disruptive innovation.”
