10 things you need to know about AI
From Google Maps to facial recognition, we’re ever more reliant on artificial intelligence. Expert Mike Wooldridge gives his reasons to be fearful – and cheerful
1 AI is not as intelligent as it seems (yet)
The one golden message is that, even with the next generation of conversational software tools like ChatGPT, which is the biggest thing – possibly ever – in AI, you are not dealing with a mind. ChatGPT [an AI-powered large language model that is trained on huge amounts of data] is a computer programme that has been heavily optimised, to use the technical term, to do one thing: tell you what you want to hear.
It’s very good at that: very fluent and very eloquent. That leads us to believe that we are communicating with a mind, like a human being, but we aren’t.
2 It can’t cope with the real world
AI is all about getting computers to do things that can only be done by human brains and nervous systems. AI finds some things tremendously hard that we don’t associate with intelligence, like driving a car. Untold amounts of money have been invested in trying to get cars that can safely drive themselves and we are still not there. We are nowhere near having robot butlers.
3 Google Translate is a game-changer
no conception of truth. If it doesn’t know the answer to a question it will simply make something up. I asked an early version of ChatGPT what it knew about me. Its two-line summary said I’d studied at Cambridge, which is a typical background for an Oxford professor, but I haven’t. That’s why I’d be reluctant to put one of these LLMs in any situation where it was making decisions with a real consequence. The technology is unreliable and prone to weird errors. I wouldn’t trust ChatGPT with my credit card.
5 Don’t believe everything you read on social media
AI can go to your feed, look at your personal prejudices and produce misinformation on an industrial scale about your favourite, or least favourite, politician based on the language you’ve used online – so you can relate to it if you’re a teenager in Waterford or a Labour voter in Sligo. It’s easy to see how that might be used to influence voters to impact political elections in Ireland and overseas.
Within a small number of years, it’s highly probable that on social media there will be much more AI-generated content than human-generated. It will be very difficult for us to know what is authentically human and what isn’t. Trusted sources of news will become extremely important to navigate that. Go forward 50 years and there will be vastly more AI-generated books, music and videos than there will be human-generated ones.