Subtle Manipulation: Expert Warns AI’s Spread Will Supercharge Consumerism

An attendee shakes hands with a robotic arm during the Japan Robot Week 2022 event in Tokyo on Oct. 19, 2022. (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)

Rampant consumerism could get a shot in the arm as artificial intelligence keeps breaking boundaries, says music expert Peter Tregear.

Tregear, the director of Little Hall at the University of Melbourne, says AI-generated music will likely proliferate even further to permeate people’s lives.

Already, this type of music is available online and can be found in social media apps like TikTok, in advertisements, documentaries, and even shopping centres (Muzak)—encouraging shoppers to buy more.

“It will be so much easier and cheaper to underscore visual material that it becomes ubiquitous,” Tregear told The Epoch Times.

“You see people walking around and basically wired in 24/7. They wake up to music, put in their headphones, and have their phone all day. Once they take it out, they’re in a shop which has music in the background,” he added.

“You’re not aware of it. That’s what makes it so manipulative because it ‘disappears,’ it literally becomes an underscore.”

The professor said it could be a trigger for more education around music, much like how concerns around social media use and pornography have spurred similar public awareness campaigns.

“We need to change the curriculum that we teach kids from primary school onwards so that they are ’sonically aware' or empowered,” Tregear said. “Otherwise, we are just accepting it and are at its mercy.”

His ideas were echoed by Associate Prof. Goetz Richter, violinist and chair of strings at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, who said AI could accelerate the commercialisation of music.

“In the 19th and early 20th century, every second person could read music and had a piano,” he previously told The Epoch Times. “Now, hardly anyone can read music who isn’t a musician.”

“Imagine a world in which literature only exists for a majority of people who can’t read,” he said.

“AI is showing us the limitations of our ways of objectifying the world.”

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AI Question Now in the Public Domain

The emergence of ChatGPT last year, a widely accessible AI-powered tool that can engage the public in all sorts of conversations, has spurred questions over the role of AI in society, compelling U.S. senators to investigate its implications.

Key questions posed by the chatbot include what impact AI will have on employment, whether the information provided by AI Chatbots can be trusted, and broader, existential questions like whether AI will surpass or supersede humans (or achieve “singularity”).

A similar debate occurred in 1996 when scientists successfully cloned a female sheep, Dolly, leading to questions on whether the cloning of humans was next.

Australia’s human rights commissioner, Lorraine Finlay, has called for regulation of AI, saying it will be leveraged by those with “Orwellian tendencies.”

“It will now be easier than ever to use generative AI cheaply and efficiently to run disinformation campaigns both domestically and abroad. There are numerous recent examples that highlight the growing threat posed by deep fakes and disinformation created and spread using generative AI tools,” she wrote in an opinion piece in The Australian newspaper.

Her warning follows in the footsteps of tech entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk, who has warned that AI’s development could reach a point that humans have no control over it.

“AI is perhaps more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design, or production maintenance, or bad car production, in the sense that it is, it has the potential—however small one may regard that probability, but it is nontrivial—it has the potential of civilizational destruction,” he told Tucker Carlson.

“The AI may be in control at that point,” he added, saying it is “absolutely” possible for AI to take control and make decisions for people.