📖 Ethics and AI (1)
What is AI Ethics?
- In ethics we consider what is right and what is wrong
- As AI is so new we must consider its appropriate use.
Ethics invites us to consider the positive and negative impacts of something.
For example:
- We may be concerned about the use of our personal data when it comes to AI
- However, AI technologies can also make use of personal medical data to treat diseases with therapies tailored to the individual
As with anything, it is about finding the correct balance
We are still understanding the full extent of the benefits that AI can bring humanity.
However, we must also not get carried away and cause problems that we won't be able to fix in the future.
📖 Algorithmic Bias
What is Algorithmic Bias?
- AI models are a reflection of their training data 👮🏻
- Poorly trained models can make poor choices 🚓
Example:
- An AI system is trained using 10 years of police arrest data to help improve efficiency.
- However, the data is biased because officers patrol certain areas more often, assuming they have higher crime rates.
- This leads to more arrests in those areas, not necessarily because more crime happens there, but because police are present more often.
- As a result, the AI learns that these areas have higher crime rates, reinforcing the original bias.
Example (referring to the previous scenario):
- Because the AI was trained on biased data, it believes some areas have more crime than others.
- It sends more police officers to patrol these areas.
- This leads to more arrests there, reinforcing the AI’s belief.
- Meanwhile, crime in other areas may be missed, which further strengthens the bias.
📖 Environmental Impact
What are the environmental impacts?
- The production of GPUs used by AI has a range of environmental impacts
- The consumption of electricity used to power AI systems is problematic
Environmental impact from production
- AI systems rely on large numbers of GPUs (graphics cards) to process data.
- Producing these components requires large amounts of water.
- This water is taken from the environment, which can harm local ecosystems.
- Manufacturing these components also releases CO2, contributing to global warming.
- AI systems use large amounts of electricity during their operation.
- Much of this electricity is still generated using fossil fuels.
- This leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions and contributes to global warming.
- Data centres that run AI systems also require significant cooling, often using large amounts of water taken from the local environment, which can impact ecosystems.
📖 Misrepresentation and misinformation
How is AI used to misrepresent and misinform?
- Many AI tools such as Sora can create life-like representations of real people
- AI tools are also capable of creating realistic yet misleading representations of a variety of things.
Deep-fakes:
- AI generated representations of real people are often referred to as "deep-fakes".
- Deep-fakes are problematic as they can portray the individual in a negative light, or even be used to profit from somebody's likeness.
- Deep-fakes raise many questions around who owns their own identity.
Misinformation:
- Misinformation is spread for either financial or political gain.
- AI tools make it much easier to produce misinformation.
- AI is now capable of generating video content that can fool the viewer into believing it.
- This poses a risk as it is increasingly easy to influence others with falsehoods.