AI and Humans: Friends or Foes?
Flávio Codeço Coelho, Heliana Mello · 2023
The advent of large language models (LLMs), has raised a strong debate across different academic fields, as well as in the general media. As a form of general purpose artificial intelligence tool, it has split the public opinion into two rather opposing camps: One that believes that it is a technology that will benefit humankind as a whole, by making us more efficient in producing texts and in other creative tasks and the other that sees it as an existential threat to our species once it acquires the ability to self-improve beyond human cognitive abilities. In this article, we look at the short history of humans and information technology, and discuss some of the benefits and risks of recent AI developments and the impact it is already having on how we understand the frontier between human and machine intelligence.