isn’ t thinking for itself but regurgitating’

By Rik Hellewell, Founder, Ovenu

Maybe it’s just me but, from what I can gather, there are a few ‘lightbulb moments’ cropping up almost daily as more and more people think about AI

My cur rent experience is that this technology isn’t too much of a threat right now as it cur rently appears to work on binar y options, with AI machines chur ning out some content and at the discretion of the way more intelligent human brain telling the machine if the content is acceptable or not If not, the machine will tr y another couple of times – basically until the human says the content is acceptable or not.

My f irst point, therefore, is that AI isn’t yet as intelligent as it needs to be for most people to have a modest conf idence in its abilities Granted it can chur n out all manner of data but, and it’s a big but just now, it isn’t thinking for itself It’s regurgitating what is already ‘out there’ in multiple different ways

Let’s face it, ‘spell-checker’ wasn’t par ticularly good in the early days and ‘predictive text’ almost has a mind of its own at times.

But what I also f ind a little mystifying is the advent of the ‘AI Tutor’ whose role is to teach the student what to put into the AI ‘search bar’ to get the machine to generate accurate infor mation

Sounds familiar, of course it does – that’s what we’ve been doing with Google, Bing and Yahoo almost since the ‘ www ’ went global in the mid-1990s The human brain quickly worked out that if you put in a ‘r ubbish’ search quer y then you get ‘r ubbish’ results back

More recently, we’ve been talking to ‘smar t speakers’ such as Alexa and Siri, which recognise the human voice All well and good, unless you catch flu then the machines are completely flummoxed by your husky voice The same with off icer and founder of ID Cr ypt Global, commented: “It’s wor r ying that so many people remain unconvinced that AI is going to disr upt their lives At this point, it’s clear that AI is going to become a dominant force in society, not least in the workplace

“There are cer tain jobs that AI is going to be able to execute to a far higher level than any human can, and do it in a much faster and cheaper way We live in a capitalistic world and industr y leaders are not going to be able to resist the benef its of replacing people with machines

“We need to increase awareness through education as AI’s prog ress is going to be swift and transfor mational ” n facial recognition – tr y it following a shor t haircut, g rowing a beard or donning coloured contact lenses

I also wonder as to who ever thought why we’ve been ticking four boxes with traff ic lights in them to ‘prove’ we’re human? Haven’t we been teaching AI to the machines for years.

Plagiarism and copyright

But the loudest noises I’m hearing about AI – plagiarism and copyright infringements Like these things just cropped up with the advent of AI? Of course not, these ‘nasties’ have been prevalent since the advent of the inter net

The majority have sat back and done nothing about it, thanks mainly to the somewhat prohibitive costs involved of bringing action against per petrators of these crimes.

I say crimes because that’s what they are, but will this still be the case as more and more people sign away their legal rights as they access the world of AI?

Ponder the above as I head over to the intelligent ‘word-count’ facility to see if it ag rees with my mental arithmetic n