Love it or hate it, AI has infiltrated our everyday lives and it is here to stay. Technology has always been growing and the current state of it leaves people posing questions about the way it’s shaping our world. From the benefits to the consequences, the impacts are far too noticeable to ignore.
ARE THERE BENEFITS?
As someone who absolutely despises AI and everything it’s doing in the world I won’t deny that there are of course going to be individuals who find it to be useful. Referencing Kat Crawford’s “Atlas of AI”, Crawford goes into heavy detail about the way data is used for machine learning systems.
At the start, with the way mugshots were being used to create this database for facial recognition, the National Institute of Standards and Technology was attempting to better their resources for law enforcement. This database then consequently became one of the largest, and set an example for the future of facial recognition as well as the way data would be acquired.
THE ETHICS PROBLEM
Data collection is a thin line between doing things to make our lives better and doing things that invade privacy and harm individuals. In relation to the mugshots used, ask yourself: Did these people give consent for their photos to be used? Did these people receive compensation? Did these people even know these images were being used?
I think about AI art I see so much of on social media these days. Those are products of an artist’s work being taken without permission to then feed a machine and have it learn to create someone’s art prompt. This goes beyond the AI art we see, even the text that ChatGPT is spitting out when you ask it to write an essay for you, those words are all just amalgamations of different people’s work.
As Crawford states about data, “Data is more commonly seen as something to be taken at will, used without restriction, and interpreted without context.”
AI IN ACTION
There are so many types of AI available for people to use: ChatGPT, Gemini, Grammarly AI, Leo, etc. I mostly only have experience using Chatgpt and I can’t stand it.
For how unethical AI is to grow and get better, you would hope that when you use it, the responses would be better. You the prompter have to be good at writing to get AI to do what you want but even then, after a certain point, AI just breaks and has no idea what its doing.
I like to test ChatGPT by requesting information on shows I’ve seen. Not once has it ever managed to be accurate. If we’re going so far to get data to build these systems, we have to provide results that justify these unethical methods. I don’t like AI,I probably never will, so I expect it to get better and improve or else we’re putting our time and effort into the wrong technology.