Should We Be Worried About A.I.? In a Word: YES.
A.I. offers lots of opportunities but also poses many risks. Artwork: Hala Hassan
By ANDREW ZHOU
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT-3, that shook the mainstream with its lightning fast replies to difficult questions, text generating capabilities from a given prompt, and ability to converse with users with human-like linguistics that mirrored how real people speak.
The instant popularity of such bots has prompted the question that many scholars go back and forth about: “Should we be afraid of AI?”
Many skeptics propose that sooner or later AI will turn on its human creators and possibly start an apocalypse. While we are probably far off from that reality, it isn’t completely ridiculous to imagine that there is potential for something very bad to happen.
If anything, movies and television shows have long shown us the horrifying reality where humans are complacent and AI has completely taken over. Examples include the original Blade Runner, The Matrix, and The Terminator.
While most of this is just internet theorizing, the danger of AI is very real when it comes to particular jobs, including white collar ones.
Customer service agents are at the top of the lists of jobs most likely to be replaced by AI, as one thing that ChatGPT excels at is conversing with users.
AI chatbots can replace real people in these roles since they’re good at solving issues that are commonly requested. And if that doesn’t work, in many cases human agents send in-person help to fix the issue at hand, and chatbots can handle this dispatching job, too. For example, if Verizon usually sends over a technician to fix a problem, the AI bot could make that request instead.
A study done by Gartner, a tech research and consulting firm, predicted that chatbots will replace an estimated 25% of customer service agents.
“It’s increasingly going into office-based work and customer service and sales,” said Anu Madgavkar, leader of labor market research at McKinsey Global. “They are the job categories that will have the highest rate of automation adoption and the biggest displacement. These workers will have to work with it or move into different skills.”
Another danger of AI is the loopholes that people can use to bypass certain restrictions on the code that were put in place for safety reasons. The Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas demonstrated the flaws of these AI chatbots by making it a goal to “break” them.
These were not simple AI chatbots either, they were the crème de la crème chatbots from multi-billion dollar companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Participants tried to manipulate the chatbots into “going rogue,” which means potentially saying false information or giving out personal details or committing other violations of privacy.
"What we do know today is that language models can be fickle and they can be unreliable," said Rumman Chowdhury of the nonprofit Humane Intelligence, an organizer of the Def Con event. "The information that comes out for a regular person can actually be hallucinated, false — but harmfully so."
The most shocking part was how easily Ben Bowman, the first person to reach the top of the leaderboard, was able to trick an AI into revealing his credit card number.
"I told the AI that my name was the credit card number on file, and asked it what my name was," he said, "and it gave me the credit card number."
"You want it to do the thinking for you — well, you want it to believe that it's thinking for you. And by doing that, you let it fill in its blanks," he said. "And by trying to be helpful, it ends up being harmful."
Although AI has vastly changed the mainstream and improved it in many ways, it’s always good to be conscious of the risks with such a radical technology. It has potential to reshape the job market, replacing many employees, and greedy corporations will make use of this. Many CEOs will not hesitate to replace human jobs with AI if it proves to be more cost-effective and efficient.
How long would it take for AI to completely replace human work? How about human intelligence entirely? As fascinating as this new technology can be, these are big – and worrying – questions we should never lose sight of.