Navigating the AI Ethical Frontier with Dr. Kate Devlin

Q: Thinking about responsible AI, how do you do it well in a business and in society when we're thinking about the humans?

Everyone has a different take on what it means to be responsible. Most of the AI that we do, and for this I generally mean machine learning these days, people don't often directly consider the human, but it's usually humans who are using it who are affected by it. So we are trying to push for human-centred AI. It's about asking at the very outset, when you decide to design something, why is this being done and who is it affecting?

Q: Let’s look at the wider impact, and the supply chain…

One of the secrets of artificial intelligence is that it's not always artificial. There are a lot of people as well, a lot of human labour involved along the way and that can include people with outsourced work in countries like Kenya for example, where we know there is a lot of ghost work or hidden labour going on. We have to be really aware of that.

Q: You’re working with the UK government on responsible AI, but where does the UK sit in relation to other countries? Are we ahead of the curve? Are we behind the curve? Is there a curve?

We don't actually know if there is a curve. I think everyone's a little bit on the back foot when it comes to things like generative AI, for example. We knew it was coming. We hadn't realised how quickly that would have an impact because we weren't quite expecting open AI to release that publicly and then have the huge uptake that it did. We're seeing the effects of that already. That was not even a year ago that ChatGPT was released. So there's a lot of scrambling worldwide.

Q: Is there a way that AI can make us better humans, more connected, more empathetic?

I like to think there is, and a lot of my research has concentrated on the idea of companionship from AI, and I do see potential for it there. When you say things like this, people get quite upset at the idea that they think you're going to lose human companionship. I don't believe that is the case. I think as humans, we reach out to each other and we see that as a kind of a gold standard, but there have been a lot of advances in the past few years of creating chatbots that act like companions and people get a lot out of that. And it's not just about replacing a human-to-human relationships, it's about this sort of new social category that's emerging. And for some people, that's a nice way of feeling not alone. And is it really that different from coming home and putting on the radio or putting on the TV because you want to hear other people's voices? So it's someone, or something, that could listen to you, respond to you, and just make you feel a little less lonely.

Q: Is the AI going to kill us all?

The AI is absolutely not going to kill us all. Everyone I've spoken to who works in AI research, machine learning research or cognitive science and cognitive systems, none of them think that there is an existential threat from some kind of sentient artificial intelligence. It's just so unfeasible. Most people working on those systems will say that it’s not possible, but that's not to say there aren't other problems.

Listen to the full podcast on the Infosys Knowledge Institute.

Dr. Kate Devlin is a Reader in Artificial Intelligence & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She is an interdisciplinary computer scientist investigating how people interact with and react to technologies, both past and future. She is Creative and Outreach lead for the UKRI Responsible Artificial Intelligence UK program, an international research and innovation ecosystem for responsible AI.