[Correspondent Won Si-seon] Fog advisory for San Fran, and AI advisory

“There were a few minor incidents / (…) last winter / a drunkard froze to death on a bamboo ridge. / A three-wheeler who passed right by said he thought it / was a pile of garbage. But that / was just a personal misfortune and not the fault of the fog.”

San Francisco is a city of fog.

As the sun heats the land, cold air from the Pacific Ocean rushes in over the orange Golden Gate Bridge.

When you suddenly look up, the lower part of the bridge is hidden by a white curtain.

For a moment I thought there might be fog, but before I knew it, the city was drenched in the silent fog.

Just as writer Kim Seung-ok said that Mujin's 'famous product' is fog, San Francisco's famous product is also fog.

This fog was given the name 'Karl'.

It is named after a giant in Tim Burton's 2003 film 'Big Fish' who is treated as a monster by everyone due to his huge size, but is actually gentle and naive.

When the city is covered in fog, San Francisco citizens often call out the name in a friendly way, saying, “Karl has come,” and when fog rolls into Oracle Park, the home stadium of the local professional baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, they often say, “Karl has appeared in left field.”

The 'Karl the Fog' account on social networking service (SNS)

There is another specialty of San Francisco.

A few years ago, we thought, ‘Something new has come up’, but soon, artificial intelligence (AI) has silently entered everyone’s daily lives.

Open AI, which surprised the world with ChatGPT, and Antropic, which is about to go public (IPO), are both headquartered in San Francisco. Competitor Google is also located in nearby Silicon Valley.

Those who are responsible for the development of AI warn of the risks that AI will pose at some point and argue that more regulations are needed.

Even though they competitively release new models with improved performance every month, they raise their voices saying that it is a dangerous tool and that the development speed must be adjusted quickly and development must be slowed down.

Users who are familiar with Sinabro AI also show this contradictory attitude.

A survey conducted by Gallup last September at the request of Microsoft (MS) found that Western high-income countries with high use of AI were more fearful of AI.

In particular, among Americans who said they use AI every day, 68% said they were concerned about AI.

As poet Ki Hyeong-do wrote in his poem 'Fog', "Everyone has a little bit of fog," now we all fear AI, but also rely on it to some extent.

Once Antropic completes its listing, the ‘stocks of the fog’ will literally be listed on the exchange.

The speaker of the poem 'Fog' would have called it a "minor incident" and a "personal misfortune," but events that cannot be taken lightly are being repeated in the AI ​​field.

There were teenagers who developed mental disorders while talking to AI and died in pain, and several cases of plotting murder or terrorism with AI were also revealed.

When the fog thickens, the foghorn on the Golden Gate Bridge sounds low and loud to warn of this.

Ships passing under the bridge can hear the sound, estimate their location, and safely navigate between the bridge piers without incident.

Families who first experienced the personal destruction brought about by AI are sometimes screaming, sometimes holding their breath, and sobbing.

Even in the fog where we can't see an inch ahead, we may be able to move forward safely if we listen to their warning sounds and turn the bow.