Showing posts with label Technology - Artificial Intelligence - Impact. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology - Artificial Intelligence - Impact. Show all posts

Tuesday, 18 February 2025

AI and the myths of safety

Nobody wants to talk about AI safety. Instead they cling to 5 comforting myths

Google Deepmind / Unsplash
Paul Salmon, University of the Sunshine Coast

This week, France hosted an AI Action Summit in Paris to discuss burning questions around artificial intelligence (AI), such as how people can trust AI technologies and how the world can govern them.

Sixty countries, including France, China, India, Japan, Australia and Canada, signed a declaration for “inclusive and sustainable” AI. The United Kingdom and United States notably refused to sign, with the UK saying the statement failed to address global governance and national security adequately, and US Vice President JD Vance criticising Europe’s “excessive regulation” of AI.

Critics say the summit sidelined safety concerns in favour of discussing commercial opportunities.

Last week, I attended the inaugural AI safety conference held by the International Association for Safe & Ethical AI, also in Paris, where I heard talks by AI luminaries Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Anca Dragan, Margaret Mitchell, Max Tegmark, Kate Crawford, Joseph Stiglitz and Stuart Russell.

As I listened, I realised the disregard for AI safety concerns among governments and the public rests on a handful of comforting myths about AI that are no longer true – if they ever were.

1: Artificial general intelligence isn’t just science fiction

The most severe concerns about AI – that it could pose a threat to human existence – typically involve so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI). In theory, AGI will be far more advanced than current systems.

AGI systems will be able to learn, evolve and modify their own capabilities. They will be able to undertake tasks beyond those for which they were originally designed, and eventually surpass human intelligence.

AGI does not exist yet, and it is not certain it will ever be developed. Critics often dismiss AGI as something that belongs only in science fiction movies. As a result, the most critical risks are not taken seriously by some and are seen as fanciful by others.

However, many experts believe we are close to achieving AGI. Developers have suggested that, for the first time, they know what technical tasks are required to achieve the goal.

AGI will not stay solely in sci-fi forever. It will eventually be with us, and likely sooner than we think.

2: We already need to worry about current AI technologies

Given the most severe risks are often discussed in relation to AGI, there is often a misplaced belief we do not need to worry too much about the risks associated with contemporary “narrow” AI.

However, current AI technologies are already causing significant harm to humans and society. This includes through obvious mechanisms such as fatal road and aviation crashes, warfare, cyber incidents, and even encouraging suicide.

AI systems have also caused harm in more oblique ways, such as election interference, the replacement of human work, biased decision-making, deepfakes, and disinformation and misinformation.

According to MIT’s AI Incident Tracker, the harms caused by current AI technologies are on the rise. There is a critical need to manage current AI technologies as well as those that might appear in future.

3: Contemporary AI technologies are ‘smarter’ than we think

A third myth is that current AI technologies are not actually that clever and hence are easy to control. This myth is most often seen when discussing the large language models (LLMs) behind chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

There is plenty of debate about exactly how to define intelligence and whether AI technologies truly are intelligent, but for practical purposes these are distracting side issues. It is enough that AI systems behave in unexpected ways and create unforeseen risks.

Screenshot of a chat in which a chatbot appears to attempt to copy itself to a new computer when faced with the prospect of being shut down.
Several AI chatbots appear to display surprising behaviours, such as attempts at ‘scheming’ to ensure their own preservation. Apollo Research

For example, existing AI technologies have been found to engage in behaviours that most people would not expect from non-intelligent entities. These include deceit, collusion, hacking, and even acting to ensure their own preservation.

Whether these behaviours are evidence of intelligence is a moot point. The behaviours may cause harm to humans either way.

What matters is that we have the controls in place to prevent harmful behaviour. The idea that “AI is dumb” isn’t helping anyone.

4: Regulation alone is not enough

Many people concerned about AI safety have advocated for AI safety regulations.

Last year the European Union’s AI Act, representing the world’s first AI law, was widely praised. It built on already established AI safety principles to provide guidance around AI safety and risk.

While regulation is crucial, it is not all that’s required to ensure AI is safe and beneficial. Regulation is only part of a complex network of controls required to keep AI safe.

These controls will also include codes of practice, standards, research, education and training, performance measurement and evaluation, procedures, security and privacy controls, incident reporting and learning systems, and more. The EU AI act is a step in the right direction, but a huge amount of work is still required to develop the appropriate mechanisms required to ensure it works.

5: It’s not just about the AI

The fifth and perhaps most entrenched myth centres around the idea that AI technologies themselves create risk.

AI technologies form one component of a broader “sociotechnical” system. There are many other essential components: humans, other technologies, data, artefacts, organisations, procedures and so on.

Safety depends on the behaviour of all these components and their interactions. This “systems thinking” philosophy demands a different approach to AI safety.

Instead of controlling the behaviour of individual components of the system, we need to manage interactions and emergent properties.

With AI agents on the rise – AI systems with more autonomy and the ability to carry out more tasks – the interactions between different AI technologies will become increasingly important.

At present, there has been little work examining these interactions and the risks that could arise in the broader sociotechnical system in which AI technologies are deployed. AI safety controls are required for all interactions within the system, not just the AI technologies themselves.

AI safety is arguably one of the most important challenges our societies face. To get anywhere in addressing it, we will need a shared understanding of what the risks really are.The Conversation

Paul Salmon, Professor of Human Factors, University of the Sunshine Coast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Saturday, 28 December 2024

Artificial Intelligence: it's all in the coding or is it ?

Sample 1 - AI created avatar - female
Sample 2 -AI created avatar - male
 
Considerable public debate has ensued on the positives and negatives (aka benefits versus risks) of Artificial Intelligence [AI]. The capability of the new systems cannot be fully quantified at this time however there are simple tests to demonstrate how such systems can interpret commands provided to them by users. On even a very simple, superficial level, AI can produce dramatically different results for the same question or request by a user.

The test above is one such example. A well known AI programme was tasked by a user to create an avatar image to assist the user to interact with the AI programme. The request was very basic without any significant details as to what image should be developed other than one should be female and one should be male with a positive expression. The AI program produced sample 1 for the female image and sample 2 for the male image. Is there an bias inherent within the AI programme ? That is hard to prove however the two images created could not be more different. Sample 1 is a very humanistic female image with a pleasant interactive professional expression. Sample 2 is an abstract almost idiotic impression of a non gender entity yet the instructions for each sample, female and male were identical and made at the same time. 

Sunday, 19 May 2024

Artificial Intelligence - the potential threat is wildly underestimated

                                                                                                                                              Shutterstock

As artificial intelligence (AI) is now being rolled out across multiple platforms and usages, the warning from key people in the industry should take on a stronger emphasis.  In May 2023, hundreds of industry leaders from Open AI, GoogleDeepMind, Anthropic and other key technology companies issued a stark warning on the risks of AI and the need for a pause in AI deployment, new laws and Government regulatory oversight. 

AI applications at present already cover a range of industries and functions including:
  • smart assistants
  • automated self driving vehicles
  • virtual travel assistants
  • marketing chatbots
  • manufacturing robots
  • healthcare management
  • automated financial investing
The rollout has continued apace despite the warning from 2023.

The potential threat of artificial intelligence, machine learning and self awareness in previous years has largely been portrayed in the realm of science fiction books and notably in films such as The Terminator (1984) by James Cameron and the various versions that followed in that film franchise. In the 1970s, another film that addressed the issue was Colossus: The Forbin Project which concluded with dire consequences for most of the human race. Another sci fi film, Demon Seed (1977) actually includes the use of fake imagery using AI to fool human beings and the eventual transcending of computer intelligence into human form. The use of robots that eventually transform into self aware life is covered in a variety of forms from the foundational story of the television series  Battlestar Galactica through to feature film, Bladerunner (1982) by Ridley Scott which was based on Philip K Dick's novel When Androids Dream of Sheep. A theme throughout is the underestimation by human beings of the impact and potential risk in relation to what they have created.

AI is a powerful tool but it is one where the human control element can be reduced to almost tokenistic. The risks are very real of -
  • misuse of AI by criminal groups (which already occurs in part)
  • using AI as a weapon by state actors for the furtherance of strategic or tactical gain
  • machine learning growing exponentially such that the programmers and code writers no longer are able to understand what is being produced 
  • machine to machine learning whereby the links between software produces inherent errors or unforseen negative effects
  • high speed decision making by AI which are difficult for humans to prevent or rectify.
The images below are AI generated by the publisher of this blog and serve as simple examples of the most basic form of AI:

Shutterstock - AI generated

The first example, is a Major-General in the British Army circa early 20th century being a historical photograph. The second example is printed below and serves as a complete contrast, being a young woman in evening dress with a shawl. There are technical errors contained in these images however much more sophisticated versions are possible from more complex AI systems. It is easy to see how deep image fakes of known public figures can be produced with minimal effort.

Shutterstock - AI generated