Navigating the New Frontier: AI's Impact Across Politics, Safety, and Ethics

Exploring AI's latest breakthroughs and ethical challenges in politics, safety, and global regulations.

Major AI Video Releases: OpenAI just released Sora, creating realistic video scenes based on text inputs. If you haven’t seen some of the examples floating around the internet, plan to be amazed. It’s currently in beta and only available to a small number of users. The speculation per OpenAI Discord’s and Reddit threads is that it will be publicly released once it is paired with generative AI audio that can match. While the quality of these videos has been what’s been most talked about, the big follow-up is the potential for it to produce dangerous content. While model creators continue to iterate on safety parameters, there are still cases that get through in generated copy. Will the safeguards on Sora be robust enough to capture people trying to produce harmful or even illegal content? It’ll be interesting to see how this continues to develop.

AI in Global Political Elections: In the realm of international politics, the advent of deepfake technology has opened new frontiers for political communication, raising both opportunities and ethical dilemmas. Two notable examples have appeared. Pakistan's former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, utilized an AI voice clone to address his supporters from behind bars, creating a powerful, albeit controversial, instance of AI-mediated political messaging. Some are hailing this new technology which demonstrates how AI can bridge communication gaps under restrictive conditions. Similarly, in India, artificial intelligence resurrected the late M Karunanidhi, an iconic political figure, enabling him to "participate" in public events and election campaigns. This is the third time an AI clone of M Karunanidhi praised leaders of his political party. These examples highlight a growing trend where AI's ability to generate convincing deepfakes is leveraged for political gain, sparking debates on the implications for democracy, authenticity, and ethical standards in political communication. We’ll be watching carefully as this election cycle to see if any examples occur in the United States presidential election.

Expansion of AI in industry: AIQ has partnered with Milestone Systems to scale AI-enabled safety solutions across several industries. They will focus on enhancing operational safety for industrial facilities through real-time, active monitoring detecting which includes tasks such as analyzing potential hazards, and streamlining emergency response actions. The AI application utilizes existing video systems combined with analytics to detect PPE compliance, behavioral safety, and incident detection, with automated reporting to a central command app. This initiative represents a growing trend towards integrating AI with video management software (VMS) to improve health, safety, and environmental standards in various sectors. One sector ripe for disruption with similar applications could be airline manufacturers. This comes after Boeing’s 737 Max 9 jet experienced a significant mishap after a door flew off during an Alaska Airlines flight, attributed to missing screws in the manufacturing and maintenance process. Would be interesting to see if training an AI model on several examples of proper assembly and how assembled parts should look after each step could be a future application.

AI Financial Milestone: OpenAI recently reached a significant financial milestone by hitting $2 billion in expected annualized revenue. First reported by the Financial Times, this achievement underscores the growing commercial success of generative AI technologies. With strong interest from business customers in adopting these tools, OpenAI is optimistic about its potential for growth, aiming to more than double this figure by 2025. While this growth in revenue is seen as a major milestone by the company, it expects to continue to lose, and need to raise, billions of dollars to maintain and grow its models, especially as it expands into more multimodal applications like audio and video in addition to its current text, image and code offerings.

EU AI Policy Shift: The European Union is on the verge of implementing landmark AI regulations following approval from EU countries. This regulatory framework, heralded as a global standard, aims to ensure the safe and ethical use of AI technologies across various sectors. The AI Act emphasizes balancing innovation with safety, setting parameters for AI's military, crime, and security applications. This move is expected to significantly impact how AI technologies are developed and deployed, not just in Europe but globally, as it sets a precedent for AI governance. This comes soon after the EU has already enacted legislation aimed at regulating big tech, such as Digital Markets Act (DMA), which has companies pivoting the services they provide to european consumers. Google recently implemented changes ahead of some of these deadlines, where failure to comply with legislation such as the DMA could mean incurring fines up to 10% annual turnover which could mean billions. Source: European Parliament, Reuters, TechCrunch,?

“AI for Good” Initiative: The United Nations (UN) last year hosted a “AI for Good” summit, and in the spirit of the event is continuing initiatives with many of the event's partners. One of the latest is a partnership between the UN and Shutterstock who launched an “AI for Good” campaign aimed at producing artificial intelligence generated images for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The goal is to create awareness of using “ethically-created” images making sure that the images the outputs are trained on are legal and ethical, with artists of input images being at least made aware if not compensated for their work being used. Applications end Feb. 29th and will be judged by a panel featuring Shutterstock executives like Sejal Amin, the Chief Technology Officer and Alessandra Sala, the Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.