Talking point
AI… friend or foe?
There’s been no bigger story this year than the development of artificial intelligence, with some calling for the pace of it to be slowed down. Expert commentator Lara Lewington assesses the perils and the potential that it presents to all of us
As co-presenter of the BBC’s technology show Click, I’ve seen how artificial intelligence has rapidly developed. Even the very definition of AI can be a source of debate, but put simply, it is a computer’s ability to do a task that usually needs human intelligence. And it’s been quietly hiding in our everyday lives in different ways for years.
From the moment your smartphone recognises your face in the morning, to voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, right up until you log into your favourite streaming service for some evening entertainment, it’s embedded in so much of what we do – yet most of us hadn’t been thinking about it.
That was until the emergence of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that seemed to change everything. The platform writes like a human based on what you’ve asked it to create. It doesn’t actually know anything; it’s working on the statistical probability of what word is likely to follow another, a bit like supercharged predictive text. But the results can be convincing. At the back end of 2022 it took the world by storm, both amazing and terrifying us, and the AI debate went mainstream. Some feared development was spiralling out of control and that humans could lose their superior place in the world.
Will AI ‘take over’, as news headlines seem to predict? Well, first we’d have to let it. It’s not born with intention; it’s the creation of humans, drawing on data produced by us. But many people are unsurprisingly jolted by the idea that it could try to influence how we think, encourage our choices and even make decisions for us.
It’s already been doing a lot of this, and it’s not always a bad thing, but it somehow seems bigger and scarier now we’ve come face to face (or finger to keyboard) with artificial intelligence, which had maybe seemed like a mystical concept. Algorithms didn’t excite people before, but it was a platform that could write a good email that got everyone in a frenzy. And that’s probably because we could have a go and find out for ourselves that it can create something that seems like it was written by a living, breathing human. Uh-oh…
The positive power of algorithms crunching enormous quantities of healthcare data, to make findings that no human ever could, is incredible. And it’s already trying to tell us what it thinks we might like – when curating our social media feeds, personalising adverts (not that I’m convinced it gets those right a lot of the time), or suggesting what music we might like.
JOB WORRIES
