Flagging the artificial

Pax Silica had been on the lips of every other enlightened Filipino in the past few weeks. While I have yet to fully comprehend the various layers of intricacies involved in this ongoing controversy, from my understanding Pax Silica is an alliance of different countries — the Philippines now included — that have joined forces and pledged to build technological hubs for the further development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

I am not even going into the supposed hazards these infrastructures will have on the environment. All I know is that while I was mulling on this topic for today’s column, water was all around the country — as a result of intense flooding brought about by immense rainfall in the past several weeks. Water, water everywhere and yet, in some areas in the Philippines, there’s no clean water to drink.

If the construction of these complexes meant for AI development is finished, the supply of water surrounding the technological hubs are supposed to be affected because maintenance of AI hardware requires a lot of water to cool the equipment. And what about the people who will be displaced in the process of building these edifices?

Our national treasure, Lea Salonga, is one of the celebrities concerned about the effects of putting up data centers in the country. She reposted on her social media platforms only recently pieces of information she gathered about Pax Silica. That sparked online debates on the internet. If you ask me, I am on her side. In fact, we need more celebrity voices to create awareness about Pax Silica so that we can discuss more thoroughly its pros and cons. Surely, it has its advantages. But its disadvantages also need threshing out.

From the beginning, I had always been against Artificial Intelligence (AI). To begin with, the word artificial already comes off as negative. Artificial ingredients. Hah! Synthetic!

Artificial intelligence. I know of people who consider its arrival as a great gift to humanity. Maybe it is — to professions that involve data analysis and other related fields. But in creatives?

No soul

I am currently rescuing a book that is scheduled for launching this year. But before it was sent for printing, the client’s friends who have technical knowhow noticed that some of the chapters in the book were AI-generated.

I also went through the book, but the technological idiot that I am, I failed to notice it. All I knew was that the writing was boring. If you ask me, good writing is supposed to be “malibog,” not in a sexual way though. Passionate. That’s a more appropriate word. A writer should always be throbbing with passion to be able to excel at his craft.

When I asked who wrote the book, I was told it was a 21-year-old who worked on it. Twenty-one?! But the publisher proudly heralded that he is an award-winning writer — yes, at 21.

All of a sudden, I was engulfed by insecurity. I had been in journalism since the printing of the Doctrina Christiana and have yet to win an award for writing! Doctrina Christiana was the first book published in the Philippines. This was in 1593 and I exaggerate, of course.

Going over the book written by the 21-year-old award-winning writer, I noticed that there was something else it lacked aside from passion. It didn’t have soul. So, that’s AI-generated writing for you. The book was hopelessly hollow. And shallow. Apparently, there is only so much AI can do when it comes to creatives.

While redoing the book (it’s unsalvageable), I had to go over a mountain of documents. I was advised by some friends to use AI for research. It was going to make my work easier. They were wrong. I now have a new set of friends.

There is a part in the book where I needed to know how much a square meter of lot cost in Forbes Park in the early 1950s. AI research revealed P80 per square meter. Using common sense, that would not have been possible. P80 was a huge amount at the time. No one would have been able to afford that in the 1950s.

Goodbye, AI! I decided to look for a more credible source of information. I then remembered I had a copy of the book The Manila We Knew. I was sure it was just there somewhere in my library, but I still spent hours looking for it. During the last spring cleaning I had, one house help took down all the books that had already been properly catalogued in the shelves. She rearranged them according to the color of the spines.

When I found the book, I turned to a chapter written by Mert J. Loinaz. Ms. Loinaz wrote about her family’s early years in Forbes Park. They moved there in 1951. How much did her father buy the property? At P6 per square meter — paid over 10 years!

I’ve never met Ms. Loinaz and I wish we’d meet someday because I have so much respect for her based on that single piece she wrote in the book. It was so colorful and detailed. The book came out in 2006. There was already the internet then, but no AI invasion yet. I’d rather take her word, especially since it was printed in a book and that gives it so much credibility. But what if I simply relied on AI? I would have passed on wrong information in the book I am redoing. That’s one proof that depending on AI can be dangerous.

Inaccuracies

Going over my phone early this week, I saw on Facebook a feature that caught my interest. It was about the history of the devotion to the Mother of Perpetual Help in Baclaran. It was a reel — AI-generated, of course.

I knew something was wrong immediately. The voice-over said that people started flocking to Baclaran Church every Wednesday in 1948. But there were Japanese soldiers in uniform in the visuals. The war was over by 1945. What were those Japanese soldiers doing there outside Baclaran Church? Was that a death wish for them? A mob would have killed them outright! What was the content creator thinking? Or did he rely solely on Artificial Intelligence to help him mount that reel?

The mistakes did not end there. In the succeeding scenes, it was not the image of the Mother of Perpetual Help that appeared on the screen. I almost fell off my chair when I saw the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Of course, the Mother of Perpetual Help and Our Lady of Guadalupe are both the Virgin Mary — under different titles.

But why use an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe (She is the Patroness of the Philippines, by the way) when the feature was about the devotion to the Mother of Perpetual Help? The content creator of that Facebook feature obviously had been relying too much on AI that he can no longer distinguish between right from wrong. I hate to say this, but AI apparently had numbed whatever intelligence he had left.

AI tools are all over. But how accurate are these devices? AI is taking jobs away from people. But does AI have the discernment of a human being? I fear for the day when AI takes over the world. It will render all of us inutile.