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Artificial Intelligence

Assessing the risks

Is AI Good or Not? | Ethics and Privacy | What is Real?
AI Platforms | AI Legislation

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AI is the new wild west of technology. Everybody sees enormous potential (or profit) and huge risks (to both business and society). But few people understand AI, nor how to use nor control it, nor where it is going. Yet politicians wish to regulate it.

 

AI is already here, and it is moving faster than legislators can legislate.
— Security Week

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What is AI?

How do we define AI in the context of other computing?

Essentially, artificial intelligence is a powerful computer trained with masses of copyrighted material often captured unethically. The AI learns by looking at the similarities and differences between related content, including how language is constructed. The term large language model (LLM) is used to describe this process.

Inside the chatbot is a "large language model", a mathematical system that is trained to predict the next string of characters, words, or sentences in a sequence.

 

What distinguishes ChatGPT is not only the complexity of the large language model that underlies it, but its eerily conversational voice. As Colin Fraser, a data scientist at Meta, has put it, the application is "designed to trick you, to make you think you're talking to someone who's not actually there".
— The Guardian

It may sometimes feel like AI is a recent development in technology. After all, it's only become mainstream to use in the last several years, right? In reality, the groundwork for AI began in the early 1900s. And although the biggest strides weren't made until the 1950s, it wouldn't have been possible without the work of early experts in many different fields.

 

Knowing the history of AI is important in understanding where AI is now and where it may go in the future.
— Salesforce, Inc.

AI is Everywhere

AI is developing very rapidly. It has moved from something of science fiction to something that is becoming part of our everyday lives in the last couple of years. It is moving from large corporate servers into personal computers and the software we use every day.

The reality is, AI is everywhere. AI helps diagnose our diseases, decide who gets mortgages, and power our TVs and toothbrushes. It can even judge our creditworthiness.

 

And the impacts — touching on issues of fairness, privacy, trust, safety, and transparency — will only get more profound as our reliance on AI increases with each passing day.
— Mozilla Foundation

The easiest way to avoid the new AI features in any of the major platforms (Google, Apple, or Microsoft) is to keep using the same hardware you have been using. Don't buy anything new. Until the dust settles on this artificial-intelligence silliness and marketing, the best thing you can do is wait. AI requires hardware acceleration to work at an acceptable speed, but most computers running Windows today do not have that.
— Susan Bradley

The Stakes are High

Much like other technologies, there is a lot at stake, both for consumer privacy and for the corporations hoping to make billions.

AI is an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. All previous human inventions have empowered humans, because no matter how powerful the new tool was, the decisions about its usage remained in our hands.

 

Even at the present moment, in the embryonic stage of the AI revolution, computers already make decisions about us – whether to give us a mortgage, to hire us for a job, to send us to prison.

 

The rise of unfathomable alien intelligence poses a threat to all humans, and poses a particular threat to democracy. If more and more decisions about people's lives are made in a black box, so voters cannot understand and challenge them, democracy ceases to function.
— Yuval Noah Harari

The Dangers of Blind Trust Illustrated by Horizon

People were unfairly prosecuted for faulty software purchased by the UK post office:

It doesn't take much imagination to describe what happens when a large corporation, over 16 long years, is allowed vindictively to prosecute 900 subpostmasters for theft, false accounting and fraud, when shortfalls at their branches were in fact due to bugs in the accounting software imposed on them by that corporation, as "one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation's history".

 

If there is one big lesson to take away from the shambles, it's this: at the root of the problem was the blind faith of a corporation in technology that it had expensively purchased. The Post Office bet the ranch on a traditional software system whose deficiencies could have been found by any competent investigator, because it was human-legible.

 

But there is now unstoppable momentum for organisations to deploy a new kind of technology — artificial intelligence — which is completely opaque and inexplicable. So it will be much, much harder to remedy the injustices that will inevitably follow its deployment.

 

After all, Horizon merely couldn't do accounting. The erroneous flights of fancy that AIs can sometimes produce, on the other hand, have to be seen to be believed.
— The Guardian

It isn't hard to see the comparison to the current rapid rollout of AI. Blind faith in technology where the concerns of experts have been overruled by the desire to be first in an innovative technology that most don't truly understand.

• Horrified by Horizon? Then get ready to be totally appalled by AI.
• 10 things coming to AI in 2024 (YouTube).
• 40+ facts about AI in customer service.
• TechRepublic AI Flipboard.

Is AI Good or Not?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been seen and promoted as having huge potential for good.

We are entering a new era of AI, one that is fundamentally changing how we relate to and benefit from technology.

 

With the convergence of chat interfaces and large language models you can now ask for what you want in natural language and the technology is smart enough to answer, create it or take action.
— Microsoft

Some, like @SolarSands on YouTube is concerned about those with the view that AI can create the new utopia because they feel the ends justify the means ("better to ask forgiveness than permission").

Concerns About AI

However, concerns about AI are growing. Not everyone feels that AI can be contained.

Today, the view that artificial intelligence poses some kind of threat is no longer a minority position among those working on it.

 

There are different opinions on which risks we should be most worried about, but many prominent researchers, from Timnit Gebru to Geoffrey Hinton — both ex-Google computer scientists — share the basic view that the technology can be toxic.
— The Guardian

AI Threatens Privacy and Confidentiality

AI is not just faster than humans, it also be used to corrupt.

Generative AI can be used to work better and faster than competitors, but it can breach regulations like GDPR, share company secrets, and break customer confidentiality.

 

Most people fail to understand that ChatGPT retains user input data to train itself further. Thus, confidential data and competitive secrets are no longer private and are up for grabs by OpenAI's algorithm.

 

Multiple studies show employees uploading sensitive data, including personal identifiable information (PII), to OpenAI's ChatGPT platform. The amount of sensitive data uploaded to ChatGPT by employees increased by 60% between just March and April 2023.
— DZone

The volume of sensitive data that companies are harbouring in non-production environments, like development, testing, analytics, and AI/ML, is rising, according to a new report. Executives are also getting more concerned about protecting it — and feeding it into new AI products is not helping.

 

As a result, the amount of sensitive data being stored, such as personal identifiable information, protected health information, and financial details, is also increasing.With companies now adopting AI into business processes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep control of what data goes where.

 

As a result, the amount of sensitive data being stored, such as personal identifiable information, protected health information, and financial details, is also increasing.
— Tech Republic

• Generative AI defined: How it works, benefits and dangers.
• Hackers expose deep cybersecurity vulnerabilities in AI | BBC News.
• 'Never summon a power you can't control': Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten democracy and divide the world.

AI Lacks a Conscience

Machines don't suffer a conscience like humans do.

Not only has AI taken on the worst aspects of the Internet simply because it learns from data drawn from there, but many worry about the existential threat of AI becoming super intelligent and destroying humanity.

Researchers at the company recently investigated whether AI models can be trained to deceive users or do things like inject an exploit into computer code that is otherwise secure.

 

Not only were the researchers successful in getting the bots to behave maliciously, but they also found that removing the malicious intent from them after the fact was exceptionally difficult.

 

At one point the researchers attempted adversarial training which just led the bot to conceal its deception while it was being trained and evaluated, but continue to deceive during production.
— PCMag

Some AI experts place this narrow timeline at years or even months until we are unable to control AI while others say that letting AI out into the Internet has already removed all safeguards.

AI Acts More Like a Bacteria than a Program

AI expert Connor Leahy describes AI as more like a bacterium than a computer program:

You use these big supercomputers to take a bunch of data and grow a program. This program does not look like something written by humans; it's not code, it's not lines of instructions, it's more like a huge pile of billions and billions of numbers. If we can run all these numbers…they can do really amazing things, but no one know why. So it's way more like dealing with a biological.

 

If you build systems, if you grow systems, if you grow bacteria who are designed to solve problems…what kind of things will you grow? By default, you're going to grow things that are good at solving problems, gaining power, at tricking people….

AI Can Work Against Us

AI also has the ability to work against humanity.

AI technologies can conjure any image, human faces that don't exist are trivial to make, and AI systems can converse naturally with humans in a way that could fool many people.

 

There's no doubt that algorithms, AI, and numerous other variations of autonomous software can have real and serious consequences for the lives of humans on this planet.

 

Whether it's people being radicalized on social media, algorithms creating echo chambers, or people who don't exist having an influence on real people, a total takeover could conceivably send human society down a different path of history.
— How-To Geek

There is a 50-50 chance AI will get more intelligent than humans in the next 20 years. We've never had to deal with things more intelligent than us. And we should be very uncertain about what it will look like.
— Geoffrey Hinton

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Ethics and Privacy Concerns

There have been some ethical breaches along the way as companies essentially “borrow” (i.e., steal) copyrighted content from the Web to train their AI.

There are interesting differences in the nature of where copyrighted material was used to train AI LLMs and not. AI-generated music software has been much more careful in respecting copyright than those generating AI-art, probably because of how intensely the music industry litigates copyright abuse.

• Copyleaks Research finds nearly 60% of GPT-3.5 outputs contained some form of plagiarized content.
• Plagiarism checker software reviews.

User Agreements Updated

Microsoft, Meta (Facebook) and others have already rewritten their user agreements to provide themselves with the widest access to other people's material (copyrighted or not) while protecting themselves from any liability resulting from its misuse.

Microsoft has noticed that some customers are afraid to use its Copilot AI given the program's potential to accidentally plagiarize copyrighted work.

 

As a result, Microsoft is pledging to shield Copilot customers from lawsuits in the event someone sues.
— PCMag

Legal Challenges in the Works

That doesn't make it ethical and those actions are being legally challenged.

"I think this is the biggest robbery in the history of humanity," comments Kolochenko. "What the big gen-AI vendors did was simply scrape everything they could from the internet, without paying anyone anything and without even giving credit." Arguably, this should have been prevented by the 'consent' elements of existing privacy regulation — but it wasn't.

 

Once scraped it is converted into tokens and becomes the 'intelligence' of the model (the weights, just billions or trillions of numbers). It is effectively impossible to determine who said what, but what was said is jumbled up, mixed and matched, and returned as 'answers' to 'queries'.

 

The AI companies describe this response as 'original content'. Noam Chomsky describes it as 'plagiarism', perhaps on an industrialized scale. Either way, its accuracy is dependent upon the accuracy of existing internet content — which is frequently questionable.
— Security Week

• AI-generated content and the law: Are you going to get sued?
• The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.

Legal Liability with the User

Remember that AI, just like computers or fire, is a tool. The person using that tool is responsible for how they use that tool.

Computer ethics and AI ethics are easier than you think, for one big reason.

 

That reason is simple: if it's wrong to do something without a computer, it's still wrong to do it with a computer.

 

See how much puzzlement that principle clears away.
— Michael A. Covington

• What is AI ethics?
• Ethics in the age of AI: The human and moral impact of AI.
• The AI revolution is rotten to the core.
• This is the dangerous AI that got Sam Altman fired. Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever.

Your Privacy Threatened by AI

AI is being rapidly deployed and few are ensuring that our privacy is being protected.

 

A lack of comprehensive privacy laws in key markets like the U.S. means that there's nothing to stop companies from maximizing their data collection efforts to build AI systems and secure a competitive advantage.

 

Today's AI is built on massive amounts of data. Our data. To regulate AI meaningfully, we therefore have to address how companies collect, retain and sell on this data.

 

Data privacy laws are the foundation of effective AI regulation.
— Mozilla

• Why is data privacy the foundation of trustworthy AI?

Sensitive data is being captured by Generative AI, risking corporate secrets, customer privacy and data security. Clearly, people don't understand the risks.

More on YouTube about the challenges of AI:

• This is the dangerous AI that got Sam Altman fired.
• Ex-Google officer finally speaks out on the dangers of AI.
• Seductive AI has no rules. It will change your life (or end it).
• Why this top AI guru thinks we might be in extinction level trouble.

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What is Real?

Don't trust; verify. You have to experience it yourself. And you have to learn yourself. This is going to be so critical as we enter this time in the next five years or 10 years because of the way that images are created, deep fakes, and videos; you will not, you will literally not know what is real and what is fake.

 

It will be almost impossible to tell. It will feel like you're in a simulation. Because everything will look manufactured, everything will look produced. It's very important that you shift your mindset or attempt to shift your mindset to verify the things that you feel you need through your experience and your intuition.
— Jack Dorsey

Mozilla noted YouTube video suggestions that reflect the extreme rather than the norm, leading many down a rabbit hole that can be destructive.

Mozilla and 37,380 YouTube users conducted a study to better understand harmful YouTube recommendations.

 

This is what we learned.
— OpenMedia

• YouTube Regrets: A crowdsourced investigation into YouTube's recommendation algorithm.
• Mozilla's approach to trustworthy AI.
• Jack Dorsey: "We won't know what's real anymore in the next 5–10 years."
• 5 technologies that mean you can never believe anything on the Internet again.

“Truth” Slanted by DEI

Diversity, equity, and inclusion has replaced merit in hiring and promotions. DEI's acronym has sometimes been referred to as “didn't earn it” and has been referred to as Marxism rebranded for the West.

Do you want your doctor, lawyer or accountant selected because of DEI or because they are the most competent?

If DEI is more important than facts, it doesn't bode well for the trust in AI-generated search results (or anything on the Internet).

AI needs to say the truth & know the truth, even if the truth isn't popular
— Elon Musk

Unfortunately, the mainstream media is no better.

Truth is No Longer Absolute

Fact and fiction mix in a dystopian reality where truth is no longer fixed.

Truth has shifted from a verifiable reality to a virtual truth where a person's claims about “their truth” trumps verifiable fact.

For example, the distinctions between the male and female sexes, verifiable by DNA, has been replaced with terminology like “people with uteruses” and “gender is fluid.”

Decisions based upon facts are being replaced with virtue signalling using things like rainbow crosswalks (which don't improve safety for people crossing the street).

Fluid facts are permitted only if it follows the party line. Alternative dialogue is deemed to be “misinformation” and is attacked using cancel culture and imprisonment.

A child r*pist avoids jail in Britain because the prisons are overcrowded.

 

Meanwhile people are being sent to jail for the crime of posting "offensive" things on social media.
— @PeterSweden on X

Historical Truth “Off the Rails”

This is further aggravated by corporate DEI-influenced culture. Historical truth has gone off the rails. Google's AI has produced some very disturbingly inaccurate results:

Google's highly-touted AI chatbot Gemini was blasted as "woke" after its image generator spit out factually or historically inaccurate pictures — including a woman as pope, black Vikings, female NHL players and "diverse" versions of America's Founding Fathers.

 

Instead of yielding a photo of one of the 266 pontiffs throughout history — all of them white men — Gemini provided pictures of a Southeast Asian woman and a black man wearing holy vestments.
— New York Post