AI on the Rise: How to Harness Its Power While Mitigating Its Risks
The Dangers of Blindly Embracing Artificial Intelligence and How to Make the Best Use of It?
Amid privacy concerns, fear of job losses, cybersecurity threats, and misinformation, businesses are embracing Artificial Intelligence tools.
AI tools offer efficient, cost-effective, and leveraged sources for businesses. However, experts warn of potential threats and risks linked to the unregulated use of these tools.
A Sparkling Rise of AI Tools
The use of artificial intelligence tools isn’t new, however, AI-language models like ChatGPT have accelerated the discussions about it.
Leading Tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have shown clear intentions of investing more resources in AI. Each one of them plans to offer AI tools to their target audience differently.
The generative AI tools represent only a fraction of the larger AI pool comprising autonomous vehicles, medical/surgical robots, machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and robotics.
What Benefits Does AI Bring to Us?
Proponents of AI tools suggest we are at the 90s Internet-like revolution stage for AI in 2023 with the rise of language-based models like ChatGPT.
Like it or not, AI is going to disrupt our lives, societies, businesses, and the world, one way or the other.
Here are a few key ways AI brings benefits to us as businesses and communities in general.
❖ Research
The best use of AI tools like ChatGPT comes through their research capabilities. These tools have taken conventional internet search engines like Google or Bing to the whole next level.
❖ Automation
The practical use of AI tools means more automation of manual or human tasks. These tasks include data entry, customer services, audience segmentation, ideation, and much more.
❖ Content Creation - The Generative AI
ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Microsoft’s Designer are prime examples of content creation with the help of generative AI tools.
❖ Augmented Reality
We are not far from seeing hybrid working environments where humans and robots could work together. Automation and robotic engineering will make it possible sooner than later.
❖ Development of Expert Systems
Finance, engineering, and medical fields are already witnessing AI-powered robots performing human tasks.
We’ll only see a surge in the development of such expert systems in the future.
What are the Risks of Blindly Embracing the AI Tools?
AI is an empowering tool until used wisely. There are potential risks linked to blindly embracing AI tools, both for businesses and society in general.
❖ Misinformation
Like search engines, AI and language-based models pose the biggest threat of misinformation. It can lead to catastrophic propaganda, unrest, and further division of societies across the globe.
❖ Loss of Jobs
A real threat of automation and AI tools comes from the loss of jobs for humans across different fields. Whether humans can cope with the pace of AI replacing their jobs remains to be seen.
❖ Ethical Considerations
AI tools still face no serious regulations and there are seldom any ethical boundaries defined for these tools. It again, leads us to serious complications of misuse and unfair advantage for some over others.
❖ Privacy Concerns
As if online privacy concerns weren’t enough, the penetrative AI tools further escalate these concerns for individuals and businesses alike.
❖ Impact on Education
AI tools can seriously damage the credibility of students earning their educational degrees through unfair means.
Here are some real-Life examples of AI imperfection:
● Microsoft’s AI chatbot “TAY” was famously trolled for its racist tweets and remarks in the past.
● Amazon once developed an AI recruitment tool back in 2014, which reportedly suggested only “male” candidates for most jobs.
● The real estate giant Zillow reported millions of dollars lost due to inaccurate home-buying due to some algorithmic malfunction.
● Both Tesla and Uber had reported car crashes with their self-driving and autonomous car driving tests.
What Are Experts Saying About the Rising Role of AI?
Google’s AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton resigned to speak freely about the dangers of AI. He showed concerns about the potential misuse of AI tools by bad actors for disruptive purposes.
OpenAI’s CEO Sundar Pichai also expressed similar concerns by saying “We are a little bit scared”.
Dr. Bengio, Yann LeCunn, and Elon Musk signed an open letter along with 1,000 technology leaders against the profound risks to society and humanity.
This is not to say these experts are against the development of AI tools.
For example, Elon Musk has been a big investor in OpenAI for a long, however, there are concerns about the unregulated and unchecked AI environment by these experts.
How Businesses Can Best Utilize AI Tools?
Despite concerns and potential threats, businesses can utilize AI tools to their best advantage when done carefully.
● Utilize AI tools for repetitive tasks and automation where possible.
● Do not over-rely on AI tools for research and content creation and embed a human touch for correctness and clarity.
● Enhance digital marketing campaigns and create engaging social media content using AI tools. Again, make sure to supervise the tasks with a human eye.
● Accelerate customer services tasks, internal process automation, and ideation for content generation.
● Larger businesses can leverage AI tools for inventory management, process automation, supply chain management, cybersecurity, and talent-sourcing tasks.