AI for AI's sake
AI as an aid not an alternative
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Friends,
There are a ultimately two brackets of people at the moment. Those who are pro-AI - and those who are either a skeptic, disbeliever, haven’t quite had a go yet, can’t see the potential - or who haven’t been able to keep up, yet. The former group is small, but growing. It’s the camp that I sit in. It’s also a place that I hope many of you are.
But we’re all still learning - and it’s a bit of the Wild West. And I don’t like cowboys. One of my pet peeves is when AI starts to slip into products where it not really needed. AI for the sake of AI. It feels like some sort of edict from a CEO to have AI in a product.
LinkedIn is one such example. When you next visit, you’ll see a sort of sematic question that provided extra information on a post. It’s irrelevant at best - at worst, it becomes a detriment of the product’s ethos. It feels a little bit like LinkedIn shoved Perplexity into the product. Not everything needs to be an AI chat feed.
In contrast, Amazon has saved me probably hours with its summary feature at the top of the reviews. “Customers say…AI-generated from the text of customer reviews”. It’s smart and simple - and saves me and you time.
However, the other thing that LinkedIn and other UGC platforms have problems with is that of AI generated spam - both posts that are auto-generated and comments. It’s starting to get obvious. And it seems as if no body cares. A sort of horrible by-product from the benefit that AI brings.
A couple of months ago, my trusted electric toothbrush, gave up the ghost. It likely lasted 10 years which is a good stint - but in my search for a replacement, I got lost in the plethora of options. One that confused me was the AI toothbrush from Oral-B. I was intrigued. Should I upgrade from the boring regular pro-3 or should I quadruple my spend with the promise of “mouth invincibility” and get the io6 with AI? Did I really need AI to brush my teeth?
After a minute too many, I consulted my dental friend: “Pro3 is all you really need. The AI series was released as they lost their patent for the oscillating mechanism”
So, in some instances, AI is being used for the sake of AI - and in this case to protect the business - the AI bandwagon really just turned into marketing. And that makes me a bit sick inside. In all the use cases of AI, we are confused enough - so the ethics of AI become imperative.
I believe and predict that AI will surpass human intelligence. If not now, then later. Elon Musk anticipates AI will be smarter than any human by the end of the next year and exceed collective human intelligence within five years. I see it more as an anchor point in humanity to transform society - to make us more productive and efficient. Perhaps future generations will need to work less. After all the 5:2 work week is somewhat arbitrary. Imagine if we understood the real requirements of work and skills and matched accordingly. Maybe a question for my great grandkids?
Despite my optimism, I have concerns about AI's impact on society: AI spam is one and AI for AIs sake is another. But wider ranging issues like a potential increase in warfare, the collapse of social orders, and the need for regulatory measures are ones that government and policy makers need to address.
Any proposed policy needs to introduces comprehensive AI regulatory principles focusing on safety, security, transparency, fairness, and accountability. AI developers and deployers have significant power and need to be mandated to ensure transparency, conduct thorough testing, and adhere to existing laws concerning data protection, privacy, and intellectual property. We also have forgotten about equity. AI systems must comply with equalities legislation, be inclusively designed to prevent discrimination, address the needs of diverse socio-economic groups including the elderly and disabled, and ensure generated data adheres to standards of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability - but also those of different ethnic backgrounds.
I often judge based on where the money is going. Investments in AI are booming, with a consequent talent war in Silicon Valley with aquihires of teams and even companies. This investment is driven by a belief in AI's long-term profitability and its capacity to revolutionize various sectors, including finance and technology as well as other behemoths like education and healthcare.
As we stand on the cusp of an era where artificial intelligence is poised to become an intrinsic part of our daily existence, human behaviour is experiencing a transformative shift. At the vanguard of this shift are Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, which herald a new paradigm for how social scientists study human interactions and societal frameworks.
The idea of replacing actual human participants with digital constructs may seem like a venture into the realm of science fiction, yet it is a reality we are confronting today. This approach raises substantial ethical and methodological concerns. A key issue is the integrity and provenance of the data that trains these models—enormous online datasets that often carry inherent biases. If unchecked, these biases, whether they pertain to gender, race, or socioeconomic status, could distort research findings and reinforce existing disparities.
Although LLMs can replicate human responses with impressive accuracy, they lack the subtlety nuance and depth of true human insight - something that irks me every time I reach a customer service bot. They do not experience or know emotions, endure hardships, pursue goals, or evolve as humans do - or go through the struggles that we all have. They don’t know love. They don’t know loss. Consequently, LLM outputs should not be mistaken for genuine replacements for the complex and sometimes chaotic insights drawn from real-world interactions and human-centric studies.
While LLMs like ChatGPT constitute an innovative addition to the human toolkit, they remain just that—tools. They do not supplant the depth and breadth of human experience. As we leverage their potential, it is vital that we maintain perspective on their role as aids, not alternatives, in our continued exploration of the human condition.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
P.S. The Best Photos and Videos of the 2024 Solar Eclipse: In case you didn’t look up.
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