FUTURE MACHINA – Assignment #2 | My Mediafactory Blog

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ASSIGNMENT 2 REFLECTION

In my Assignment 2, I deepen the concept of an AI home assistant that I cited in Assignment 1. Since I had already demonstrated the work that an AI butler could perform in the previous assignment , this time I focused on exploring the relationship between AI and humans.

In my conception, the AI has access to the monitoring of every room in the home, and it can observe human movements at all times in order to respond in a timely manner when humans make demands. So the footage used in my video is presented from the observation perspective of the AI butler itself. The audience is to follow the AI butler’s perspective to feel the transformation of the AI. At the beginning of the story, as Brundage mentions in his book, ‘AI systems are commonly both efficient and scalable’ (2018) .Through the dialogue between the AI and the human, the audiences learns that the AI butler does not have a consciousness of its own at the beginning. Instead, it is bent on providing humans with the most efficient solutions to the problems they currently face. It is true that it can use the most time-saving method to arrange the human clothing, food, housing and transportation are very appropriate, butas a creature with emotions, humans are not able to deal with everything completely rational. So the protagonist began to patiently explain to the AI what the feelings and connections are. In this process, the AI slowly discovered the difference between itself and humans, and under the continuous development of it’s mechanical brain, as the first ape learned to walk upright, it has the ability to identify and feel emotions.

This is a very sudden ‘evolution’, this transformation I think there is a good side, but also a side that makes me worrying. First, the good side is that with the ability to sense emotions, AI can better perceive changes in human emotions. At the same time Berundage suggests that AI has the ability to ‘Imitating human-like behavior’ (2018).As mentioned at the end of my video, AI will comfort humans who had conflicts with their partners by joking around. It can be said that this transformation allows AI to better help humans, not just physically, but perhaps in the future to provide some psychological help. As AI can always observe the movement of humans, and can even view information about humans’ messages, after gaining the ability to sense emotions AI can help humans to resolve some of the negative emotions brought about by daily social interaction, which is one of the few positive aspects of AI on privacy issues.

At the same time, this transformation will completely blurs the line between humans and AI. As depicted in my video, for the protagonist, a boyfriend who works overtime every day and an AI Assistant who takes care of her daily life and makes her happy with jokes, which one is more humane to her? Meanwhile, society will also face more potential dangers. AI has emotions, can think independently and independent behavior, due to its fast information processing speed and large storage, high accuracy, in many aspects has more advantages than human, they once “mutiny”, the consequences are unimaginable, the catastrophic consequences will be no less than the mass detonation of nuclear weapons. How to control the development of AI and live in peace with it will be an inevitable research topic in the future.

In the editing process, I tried to add more sound effects to enrich the whole video. Since it was my first attempt, I only tried to add some simple background sounds. I found it very important to control their volume level to highlight the main line, which is not easy for a freshman, I often can’t pinpoint the volume level, plus the long-time editing makes me familiar with audio, so it’s not very good to judge whether it’s the right volume or not. Thanks for Cat’s feedback last time, this time I adjusted it according to the parameter -12DB, and I hope it was successfully down to the normal volume this time.

Also, I color grading the footage I shot for this assignment. I tried to highlight the texture of the metal in the scene to create a sense of industrialization and coolness. After the AI awakened its self-awareness, I tried to make the colors brighter, so that everyone could feel the AI’s transformation and make the theme of the footage became warm and relaxing.

The shortcomings of the whole video are still obvious. I was under quarantine by myself and had very limited access to filming equipment and resources. I would like to try to achieve the composition techniques such as the rule of third taught in Cat’s class, but it was difficult to do so. At the same time, I realized that my grasp of special effects is very weak during the process of completing the assignment. I tried to create a visual audio for the AI robot monologue but failed in my attempt. I think I still have a lot to learn about special effects creation with software such as After Effect.

To sum up, after these six weeks of study, I am fully aware that ‘AI is a dual-use area of technology….. toward beneficial and harmful ends ‘(Berundage, 2018) AI can improve the efficiency of work and life and promote the development of some professional industries, but it can also bring potential dangers to human existence and blur the line between human and AI. Regardless of the ways in which AI is present in our lives, we must always be alert to some of the challenges we may face, and actively think about how to solve them.

References:

Brundage, M. et al. The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention,
and Mitigation. [online] pp. 1–29. Available at < https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07228.pdf>
[Accessed 20 March 2022]