- Legendary South Korean Go player Lee Sedol was defeated by an AI program in 2016.
- Go players told The New York Times that the loss brought them a deeper realization about the advances being made in AI.
- Lee worries that AI will take away the value of people's creativity and originality.
One of the world's best Go players, who was defeated by an artificial intelligence program, has warned of shocking events for humanity as technology advances.
Lee Sedol Go is a legendary Korean game widely considered to be more complex than chess, and can be played both in person and online. It was once a computational challenge for AI researchers.
The Go world was shaken in 2016 when Li was defeated by AlphaGo, an AI program developed by Google's DeepMind. Li lost four out of five games.
The loss was a major upset and forced Lee into retirement in 2019.
“With the emergence of AI in Go, I realized that even if I worked really hard and got to No. 1, I wasn't the best,” Lee told Yonhap News at the time. “Even if I got to No. 1, there was someone I couldn't beat.”
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Lee said that losing to AlphaGo had a major impact on his life: “Losing to an AI meant that, in some sense, my whole world was falling apart.”
Now, he warns, the technology isn't just aimed at Go players.
“I ran into an AI problem early on, and the same thing will happen to other people,” Lee told The Times at an education fair in Seoul. “It may not have a happy ending.”
Lee told the publication he sees AI creating new jobs while eliminating others, but the retired Go player's bigger concern is how AI will affect people's appreciation of creativity.
“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” Lee told the Times, “but since the advent of AI, a lot of that has disappeared.”
Since AI went mainstream, artists and some leading intellectuals have questioned its creative capabilities.
Linguistics professor and philosopher Noam Chomsky told Business Insider in 2023 that he was “skeptical” that artificial intelligence would bring about breakthroughs in areas like arts and research.
In an interview with Stephen Colbert, film director Steven Spielberg said that AI will take the “soul” out of creative work.
“I think the soul is something that you can't imagine, that you can't put into words,” Spielberg said, “and you can't create a soul with some algorithm. The soul is something that exists within all of us.”
