AI: The Pretty and Ugly

BY JACK MATSUZAKI

PART ONE: THE PRETTY

In a stunning surge of innovation that has taken the world by storm, artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly transformed the way we live, work, and interact. The global landscape has been reshaped by revolutionary technologies, affecting every industry from healthcare to finance, and propelling humanity into a new era of unprecedented growth and opportunity.

At the forefront of this seismic shift stands OpenAI, the research lab responsible for the groundbreaking GPT series of AI models. The latest iteration, GPT-4, has ushered in a new age of AI capabilities, demonstrating an unparalleled level of understanding, creativity, and adaptability. Its applications have spread far and wide, solving complex problems and enabling new forms of communication and collaboration.

You probably couldn’t tell, but those 2 paragraphs were actually made by AI. It’s hard to imagine that you can simply input a prompt into AI, and they can pump out a 10 paragraph essay in a matter of seconds, but what is the cost of this computing power?

HOW DOES IT DO IT?

Well a more simple answer is that they use a process called natural language processing (NLP) that focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. With this, AI is able to have full conversations, respond to questions, make follow up questions, and more.

PART TWO: THE UGLY

As cool as it is to have your very own personal assistant that knows all, there has to be drawbacks.

Limitation 1: Incorrect answers. Incorrect answers are not uncommon to see on AI’s such as GPT, Claude, and more. This could be a part that scares away customers and businesses, since having wrong information in emails, social media posts, and more, could be detrimental to a business or customer.

Limitation 2: Biased answers AI could not have made itself, which means it was built by humans. And what do humans have? Bias. Bias is unavoidable when making any product, but it shows the most in AI. If biased inputs are what determines the pool of knowledge the chatbot refers to, chances are that biased outputs will result, particularly in regards to how it responds to certain topics or the language it uses.

Limitation 3: climate concerns

Making a simple prompt into an entire essay is hard to make, but also costs a lot of resources to make. This means that there need to be server rooms, which produce large amounts of CO2. This means that AI already, even though it’s really only been popular for the past 1 - 2 years, has a noticeably large carbon footprint. The MIT Technology Review reported that training just one AI model can emit more than 62,600 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—which is nearly five times the lifetime emissions of an average American car. And seeing that there are a bunch of models available, the carbon footprint will be problematic.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

AI has been able to achieve a lot in the past few years, but what can we do to make AI more ethical? For starters, we could switch to carbon friendly models of AI, which would immensely lower carbon emissions. What we can do for incorrect answers is nothing at the moment, but the best we can do is keep learning, and keep improving. Sadly, Bias can be solved though, since humans are the ones, and will always be the ones to build on and create AI. AI will never be perfect, but the best