Question of responsible AI short on answers

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This article was published 19/04/2024 (533 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A very large crowd of Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce members attended its event Thursday, featuring the tag-line: “What makes responsible AI?”

Sarah Walker-Leptich, a partner development manager with Amazon Web Services, gamely addressed the matter.

Obviously, there is no actual answer to such a question. It’s not hard to imagine AWS would not have let Walker-Leptich appear at the event were she not sympathetic to a benign take on the technology.

She joked about how unintelligent AI actually can be, showing iterations of images she repeatedly asked an AI assistant to generate of “AI winter.” It kept including skeletons after repeated requests to leave out the skeletons.

One of her main points was to caution businesses to subscribe to a business-grade AI to protect a company from proprietary data that might be shared by employees who use ChatGPT or other free-to-use chatbots.

It’s not surprising an AWS executive would characterize the presence of such powerful technology that has been already been released into the wild in such a way.

An Associated Press story this week out of Cambridge, Mass., showed how futile it might be to think there could be some kind of plan to tame it, as it were. The article suggested each iteration is quickly outsmarting what preceded it and Big Tech companies are “saving” their more powerful creations.

It’s a subject area that almost makes you happy to be on the Prairies, an area rare to be among early adopters of technology, preferring instead to see how it plays out elsewhere.

A survey conducted earlier this year by Technation, a national organization representing the technology sector, showed Manitobans and Saskatchewanians are much more skeptical of AI than the rest of Canada.

The survey showed that 69 per cent of people from the those two provinces think AI is a threat to society, compared to 61 per cent Canada-wide.

As an AWS staffer, it’s not surprising Walker-Leptich would want to steer businesses to commercial-grade tools, but her casual suggestion you can detect deepfake AI images just by looking for things like street signs or maps or poorly rendered faces because AI is not good at them is facile at best.

These generative AI models will surely get better at that, too.

Regardless of how tentative some might be about the technology, it is futile to pretend it will not affect us. As one attendee Thursday said, it’s too late to stop it.

That’s at least partially because there is no denying the positive impact AI is already having on productivity.

Another person at the chamber event, who works at a large national Crown corp., said its customer service online chat function is being run by an AI chatbot.

Meanwhile, experience has already shown us the world of digital communication has inspired every manner of professional criminal, to the extent virtually no one is immune from the threat of cybercrime.

Even some of the largest organizations are struggling to keep up. The University of Winnipeg was so impeded by a recent cyberattack it had to extend its term. The installation of the latest technologies can be so challenging an organization as large as Manitoba Public Insurance has struggled mightily.

The legal systems in the Western world have largely decided not to regulate the internet. That’s not to say there were any obvious alternatives, but the decision has hastened the obsolescence of many industries.

The average person with no computer science training is at the mercy of the IT professionals. The same dynamic will be at play even more so with the deployment of artificial intelligence.

While it’s irresponsible to think a chamber of commerce lunch event will provide answers to as big a question as “What makes responsible AI?” or to provide a handy list of best practices that would assuage feelings of trepidation, it’s frustrating and concerning to think the uninitiated are largely left on their own to deal with it as they can.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca