From the Editor
he rise of AI is a hot topic right now, with many trying to anticipate how it might shape our future, and I think the surest bet is that we don’t really know.
Science fiction of fifty or sixty years ago imagined colonies on Mars and flying cars, milestones we haven’t hit. (Griping about the lack of flying cars always reminds me of a joke my dad used to tell from his US Air Force days about how anything can fly with enough big engines, as proved by the F-4 Phantom. I’d bet good money someone could probably get a car to fly if they were determined. As with so much engineering, the question isn’t always “Can we?” but “Who’s going to pay for it?” or “Is someone going to lose an eye?”)
Society has advanced in numerous ways, with computers not just in every home but at our fingertips and many other advances in technology, manufacturing, and construction.
One result of AI that farseeing minds did anticipate is already rising up: it makes us question what’s real. Our capacity to trust what we read and what we see, if presented on any digital format, is being eroded. As we build our ability to mimic life, we naturally are confronted with our inability to easily parse a photo from a fabrication.
As a fun side effect, this natural skepticism will, of course, be applied to images or videos that are fantastic and factual.
No, the biggest challenge was that when our incredible photographer Kerry Tasker turned over the photo, we all thought: “Oh no, it looks Photoshopped.”
At the photoshoot, we emphasized lighting our cover subjects’ faces to make sure we were showing them at their best, but that lighting ultimately flattened the image, making our photo look manufactured. Our incredible art director applied her magic and made a few subtle changes to ground the image—that’s right, we had to modify our very real cover photo to get it to look like an actual photo.
Welcome to the future.
Managing Editor, Alaska Business