The problem with A.I. and what we have to do about it.

Recently I chatted with Jessica Sier at the #AFR about how ChatGPT is taking the internet by storm to share my thoughts around ethics and open A.I. ChatGPT's results are phenomenal - as is the uptake of a million users within the first 5 days of launching and the current Microsoft-OpenAI acquisition discussions, but none of this is surprising.

The advances in computer vision

At Unleash live, a visual analytics A.I. software company, we’re making big advances in all areas of A.I. including computer vision, be it in speed of inference, robustness of analytics and ease of training and deployment of algorithms. Computer vision is a field of A.I. that trains computers to interpret information from an image or video - this allows us to identify defects and issues on remote infrastructure before they affect operations, it helps prevent dangerous situations along powerlines, it improves productivity for renewables, and many other valuable use cases where humans just cannot perform as effectively as machines.

Computer vision has seen a significant increase in adoption over recent years in almost all industries - security, healthcare, agriculture, smart cities, industrial manufacturing, automotive, aviation and many more. With open source approaches, the continuous improvement of code that can collaboratively be built, improved upon and distributed, breeds the attitude of never giving up on building more innovative and impactful A.I. algorithms and applications. Like ChatGPT, computer vision has it's own generative A.I. approaches, such as DALL-E 2 and others. This approach also gives great freedom to innovate and combine the best ideas when managed within an ethical framework, ultimately building better and more robust machine intelligence.?

Morals drive ethical behaviours

However - it's not all down to open or closed A.I. It's about the values of the people building these models, the frameworks that we, and other businesses, provide these developers as well as the users to make sound judgments to steer the technology to where it will do significantly more good for humankind, than harm.?

We constantly see this within our industry - the astounding and exhilarating benefits that A.I. brings to our customers and the power it holds to help humankind thrive and live in balance with nature. But this is only because we choose to work with a strict moral code in place. For example we do not work with personal identifiable data, and facial recognition because of the value we place on privacy. We contribute to ethics debates via the National AI Centre’s AI Think Tanks and we hold many internal meetings sharpening our understanding of ethics and the implications of our actions when building and using A.I.?

Part of Unleash live’s success is as a result of the ethical stance that we hold on this topic, and we live and breath this daily - working with a diverse range of people whether it be our teams, our customers or partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) , ESRI and Nvidia to name a few. Together we support each other's views on how we believe business should be done for good.?

Why are ethics important?

Let’s accept that machines will come and stay in our lives. Hollywood has shown us, our kids already accepted this - with Star wars, Marvel, or Star Trek. A life with smart machines is inevitable.

There is nothing wrong about machines or A.I. If anything is wrong, sadly, it’s with us humans.

We need to accept and commit to show them our best values. Commit to making this world a better place.

ChatGPT taps into masses of (human generated) data and many A.I. models train the machine by giving treats and punishments. We teach our next generation kids the same way.?

The question we all have to now consider is whether society is ready to set the A.I. kid free?

For answering this question we have to understand that it is never been hard to do the right thing, it’s now only harder to know what the right thing is. This is very hard for humans in today’s world and it is hard for the machines that we teach.

Remember, the machines read, look and listen to what we say. They will learn from what we do and how we behave.

The ethics around how we behave and act will inform how the machines react and grow. The true intelligence will be built by all of us, you and me.

We now have to show the machines what we stand for, our values, our rules. It’s time to lead, like your parents lead when you were raised, like you lead raising your family.

Is our society clear about this ethics code? What are our behaviours and rules that we all want to live by? How are we living together every day to reinforce to the machines what is right?

In conclusion

Whilst we are impressed by ChatGPT’s poetry and DALL-E's art, and look forward to seeing what evolves from this initial informative period for the bots, we continue our daily exciting journey to improve our intelligent vision A.I. at Unleash live that continues to have a positive impact for all in the field of computer vision and mankind.?

Join this discussion with your comments.