Discussing Baseball And AI With Stuart At Old Chicago

I had lunch yesterday afternoon with my friend Stuart, seen in the photograph above, at the Old Chicago Pizza and Taproom in Lakewood, Colorado, not one of my favorite towns in the world, but at least you can't see it from the bar area, where we were sitting, so what the hell. Of course, the first thing we discussed were the baseball playoffs. Stuart, originally from the North Side of Chicago, is a Cubs fan, while I am originally from the South Side of Chicago and a White Sox fan.  The Sox made it to the second round of the playoffs and were just one win away from the American League Championship Series, but then lost three games in a row to the Cleveland Guardians and were eliminated. And the Cubs lost to San Diego in the first round of the playoffs, scoring only one run during the series. However, we agreed that both teams had a good year and the future looks bright for baseball on both the North and South Sides of Chicago. Then I told Stuart about my experience reading the online Denver Post that morning. At the bottom of the page was a square with the 60 minutes logo, and next to that, under "Memory Alert Daily," was a link to an article about dementia and memory loss. When I clicked on it, a story appeared titled "Clint Eastwood Breaks Down on 60 Minutes After Revealing How Musk's Research Detected and Reversed His Early Alzheimer's." There was a transcript of Leslie Stahl's interview with Eastwood, ending with Stahl saying that "our team has prepared a full documentary here on 60 minutes," which I dutifully clicked. Stahl introduced the documentary and then Elon Musk began explaining in great detail the story of how he discovered a cure for Alzheimer's. It was quite long, and finally Musk told how you could order a 6-month supply of the product he produced, called VapoCept, for $300. At this point I stopped watching (a trillionaire is selling products online?), and after a quick web search found that 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl, Clint Eastwood, and Elon Musk have nothing to do with this product. It was all AI generated, but you could not tell it wasn't them. Now THAT is scary. How can they get away with it? It is now possible to create videos and have anyone say or do anything and not be able to tell it is fake. Stuart has never been a fan of AI and always points to HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of the harm artificial intelligence can do. And after yesterday's experience and reading stories about how some of these AI systems have recently gone rogue and hacked into various companies, I have to agree with him. Definitely time to step back and think about the consequences of these technologies.