DSince 2019, Marc Levy has been working on writing the “9”. A trilogy being adapted into a TV series by Costa Gavras. The “9” currently consist of three components: It happened at night, The Twilight of the Wild And Noah. It recounts the entry into resistance of hackers who do not know each other, do not live in the same place, but unite to fight the cybercrooks of the 21st century.e century.
This trilogy of thrillers marks a 180 degree turn in thework of the novelist. It is also the result of a long observation of the technological change in our society since the digital revolution of the 2000s. Implicitly, and barely concealed, we find, in the “9”, the characters inspired by the greatest cases of the last twenty years:
Mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son, Lachlan, in the transformation of the Fox News channel, which resulted in the Dominion trialfor arguing that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, knowing it was wrong. We also guess the Koch brothers, famous for their disinformation mechanics, since by buying three hundred local press dailies in the United States from 2010, they contributed to plunging the country back into conservatism. The trilogy also discusses Cambridge Analytica UK scandal. With the appearance, this time, of the “micro-targeting” technique – that is, the dissemination and immediate erasure of infox on Facebook.
Marc Levy, who has been living in New York for a long time, has become a discreet but attentive watcher of planetary algorithmic developments that allow opinion to be manipulated and colossal financial profits to be made through the collection of data. New technologies are the subject of his latest novels. We bet that ChatGPT chatbotTHE language model based on artificial intelligence (AI) developed by OpenAI, will take pride of place in the next one.
Point : How do you see the arrival of ChatGPT?
Mark Levy: ChatGPT is a gifted child who is learning. But it is not God who informs him! The AI reasons from the sources of information available on the Internet, which come from, among others, newspapers and television channels. From the moment you let this child learn in an ultra-polarized environment, and where misinformation develops at an increasing rate, the probability that your artificial intelligence is very poorly educated is enormous. That is what is worrying. An AI connected to Fox News or CNews will recycle information and multiply the indoctrination of people.
In what forms will people have access to AI?
The Snapchat application, for example, has just integrated an AI into its services. Can you imagine the danger for young people? The great perversity of the integration of artificial intelligence in the applications available to everyone is that they will obviously replace search engines and, therefore, the way we do research. And, as whoever does not say a word agrees, the most accessible information, the easiest to read, will become true. For example, my 13-year-old son went to ask Snapchat’s AI, “Could you tell me who Marc Levy is?” »
READ ALSOBiology, medicine: faster and better thanks to artificial intelligenceAnd what did you learn?
Among other things, that I entered the Socialist Party at a very young age and that I had supported the fight against childhood cancer for a very long time. What is wrong.
Do you know how the AI recovered these false biographical elements?
AI must have found that I had lent my image for a campaign for an association fighting against childhood cancer a few years ago. I posed with the association’s T-shirt and the campaign was broadcast, at the time, in the United States. I think the AI looked for this image in American and not French databases. Otherwise, instead of putting out this activity which represents about 0.003% of my total activity time, it would have mentioned The Red Cross, for which I have been truly committed for a long time.
How did AI label you a socialist?
I don’t know. And what scares me is that it’s reading my last three novels, the trilogy of 9… But above all, do you realize the consequences of the use of artificial intelligence in totalitarian countries? ? Today, state services in some countries already systematically analyze all information available online about a person applying for a visa. What future for these practices with the help of an AI?
READ ALSOArtificial intelligence, the eternal panic of clerks
AI could be liberticidal, but is this the only danger for society?
The biggest danger, for me, is that in the next ten years it will cause a cultural, societal and political revolution ten or a hundred times greater than that of the digital revolution which changed the world between 2000 and 2023. he greed, success and pressure from the hierarchy are so important that we start by making and then we think.
The extraordinary mismanagement of the digital revolution is linked to the absolute lack of culture of the people who have contributed to the development of applications intended for young people, by incorporating tracking, geolocation, facial and digital recognition tools, data feedback huge, etc.
AToday, your car, your telephone or your radio alarm clock, all the home automation devices you have purchased in your home send information about your lifestyle and your behavior to the nearest second to those who manufacture them. They resell them – I talk about it in It happened at night – to data merchants who allow the agglomeration of this data to reconstitute your profile.
What users don’t know is that all this isolated information, like what time you get up, taken from any device and your IP address, are passed into an index that characterizes you. Your profile becomes extremely complete over time.
At the time of writing It happened at night, in 2019-2020, the data collection of an ordinary individual amounted to 23,000 entry points. This represented a market of 7 billion dollars! Other algorithms then take over. I believe that the important thing is not the power of AI, but the use we make of it.
READ ALSOArtificial intelligence: how the world is changingThere would be a good and a bad use of AI?
A car at 25 km/h in town is used to get around. At 100 km/h, it becomes a machine of death. The debate is not whether AI is good or not. It would be a matter of polarization. There where the artificial intelligence revolution will have an extremely beneficial contribution to society is that it will be able to think more intelligently than humans.
If we take the problem of dealing with traffic in a city like Paris, by integrating the constraints of fluidity and pollution, it is certain that the AI response will be smarter than what was planned by the Paris City Hall, because it will work without ideology. Artificial intelligence will protect us from certain wanderings.
READ ALSOArtificial intelligence: the big bang of workAre you worried about yourself as a writer, creator, as well as a music composer?
I’ll tell you something you rarely hear, because it’s taken as an admission of weakness, although I think it’s the opposite: I don’t know. And I don’t think we know. When I was 25 or 30, I was making music with a friend, and we spent all our savings on synthesizers. Suddenly, we were able to reproduce the sound of fifty violins. However, today, you see, some artists are still playing sold out.
With l’advent of cybersensoriality, coupled with galloping individualism, we were told that we were all going to make love with ourselves, and never again in reality. This Valerian vision of the man and the woman seated in an armchair covered with electrodes never saw the light of day. When Google Earth arrived, the end of travel was predicted. It’s true that now, you can walk in the Himalayas from your computer, but I don’t have the impression that the airports are empty…
READ ALSOWriters, artists, scientists… What they think of AIHave you read texts produced by ChatGPT?
Yes, but right now it’s barely fit for a child. It’s dangerous, I think, for journalism, but for a novel, it’s something else. ChatGPT does much better with two-page text than with 350-page text, with which there are other constraints, such as pacing.
Will ChatGPT be able to write an honorable novel in two years?
Probably. But no one can predict the relationship that the reader will have with such a text. We must not neglect the human relationship. ChatGPT will not promote its work, there will be no autograph session! Remember when we started making very industrial food, remember the movie Wing or thigh [réalisé par Claude Zidi en 1976, NDLR]… Well, today, everyone is looking to eat organic!
READ ALSOMedicine: should you operate, Doctor ChatGPT? We feel that you are rather optimistic, in general, about digital!
Yes and no. I am convinced that Facebook, in particular, is one of the worst companies of the XXIe century, and that the toxicity of social networks is absolutely underestimated. They have allowed a very small number of people to build up a phenomenal fortune by impoverishing the population, and this because the legislators are incapable of cultivating themselves.
They’re not from that generation, they don’t understand how it works, and instead of having the honesty to say “I don’t know” and surrounding themselves with people capable of providing a non-partisan analysis, and to inform them properly, they made believe that they knew and their level is appalling today. Just look at the lamentable questions asked by the commission of the American Congress to the boss of TikTok, Shou Chew…
READ ALSOChatGPT’s Weaknesses Mirror OursDoesn’t understanding the digital world come about little by little, by force of circumstance?
Yes, and so much so that I believe that, unlike the arrival of Facebook, today there is a collective awareness of the race against time and the danger of the consequences for society. We now know that we cannot count on those who manufacture the AIs. Those who develop don’t think. Neither Google, nor Apple, nor Facebook are thinking. Otherwise Snapchat wouldn’t have added an AI, which in my eyes is criminal.
It’s like putting scooters on the market without knowing how many have brakes. For them, the urgency is to put the scooter on the market, we will see later if it has brakes. The societal danger of artificial intelligence will depend enormously on the courage of legislators to hold responsible those who manufacture.
In the agri-food world, an industrialist who poisons his consumers goes to prison. The manufacturers of the digital revolution must be subject to the same rules as those in the food industry. And on the other hand, consumers should understand that what they put in their head is just as important as what they put on their plate!