It’s interesting to me how many journalists are now writing about the ‘good and bad’ of Artificial Intelligence. That’s because I’ve been reporting about AI for decades and included it in one of my books 17 years ago (A History of Man’s Quest for Immortality). No matter, at least the story is getting more attention now. Artificial Intelligence is quickly gaining interest in the business world — including the Communications industry.
AI is Big News!
Whereas AI was rarely mentioned outside of technical circles just a few years ago, Artificial Intelligence is now big news around the world.
CNET’s Katie Collins put this in good perspective an article published just last week —
The hype around AI means it's often hard to know what we should be excited about, what we should fear and what we should dismiss as a fad.
At CES in January, the biggest theme of the biggest consumer tech show was that AI suddenly seemed to be part of every single product. Last week at Mobile World Congress, the same was true: Barcelona was abuzz with AI, to the point where it became, as CCS Insight Chief Analyst Ben Wood phrased it, "omnipresent ... but also overwhelming."
"For many attendees," Wood said, "I felt it was rapidly reaching levels that risked causing AI fatigue." AI Is Coming for Your Tech
Elon Musk started his AI company, doing business as xAI, about a year ago. Here’s a part of the announcement about the new company published last July —
The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. We will share more information over the next couple of weeks and months. Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Announcing xAI
It’s interesting that Musk, who is obviously a proponent of AI, has shared many concerns about where Artificial Intelligence may be headed in the near future. Here’s a post from X that Musk wrote last week —
The sheer insanity of that actual response from Google’s AI is staggering! They will fix it to be less obvious in the future, but the bias will still be there.
AI mirrors the mistakes of its creators.
When people wonder how things might go wrong if AI controlled the world, this example clearly illustrates the point.
The best approach to AI safety — in my opinion, the only approach that would work — is to be maximally truth-seeking.
Honesty is the best policy.
Elon Musk, X, March 5, 2024
Musk was referring to reports of racial bias in Google’s Gemini image tools. Here are a couple of news reports about it —
Facing bias accusations, Google this week was forced to pause the image generation portion of Gemini, its generative AI model. The temporary suspension follows backlash from users who criticized it for allegedly placing too much emphasis on ethnic diversity, sometimes at the expense of accuracy. Prior to Google pausing services, Gemini was found producing racially diverse depictions of World War II-era Nazis, Viking warriors, the US Founding Fathers, and other historically white figures.
In a statement released Wednesday, Google said Gemini’s image generation capabilities were “missing the mark” and said it was “working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately.” Google then suspended access to the image generation tools altogether on Thursday morning and said it would release a new version of the model soon. Gemini refused to generate any images when PopSci tested the service Thursday morning, instead stating: “We are working to improve Gemini’s ability to generate images of people. We expect this feature to return soon and will notify you in release updates when it does.” As of this writing, Gemini is still down. Google directed PopSci to its latest statement when reached for comment. Yahoo News/Popular Science
The latest version of Google's Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) will frequently produce images of Black, Native American and Asian people when prompted – but refuses to do the same for White people.
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Gemini Experiences Senior Director of Product Management Jack Krawczyk addressed the responses from the AI that had led social media users to voice concern.
"We're working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately," Krawczyk said. "Gemini's AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that's generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it's missing the mark here." Fox Business
Journalism
Many local journalists wonder how stories about Artificial Intelligence fit into their daily news coverage. Good question. Think about your audience. How many of them use computers or smart phones to do research? How might potential bias in AI impact them? How would they know? How might it impact important decisions they might make in their lives? How might it impact students who often rely on AI to research subjects in school? There are lots of potential stories local journalists can consider.
Communications
If you’re in some area of personal or mass communications, consider how dependent you’ve become on Artificial Intelligence. How might it affect decisions you make for your business and clients? If AI is biased, could it lead you to do something you might later have to apologize for or ‘clean up’ for a client?
Good or Bad?
Having worked in ‘mass communications’ businesses for almost 60 years, I’ve seen the slow but steady changes in both journalism and communications that have become a spinning ‘information flywheel’ that may be difficult, if not impossible, to control. AI is moving technology in almost every business, industry, and government at blinding speeds.
That’s one of the reasons many people in the AI industry, along with some business leaders, have addressed the need for a ‘pause’ in AI development. You may remember the much-reported ‘Open Letter’ about an AI ‘pause’ from a year ago —
AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs. As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.
Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects. OpenAI’s recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that “At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.” We agree. That point is now. Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
Have you read about a ‘pause’ on giant AI experiments during the past year? Other than the recent pause on Google’s Gemini image tools, probably not. What about government agencies? Are nations pausing or slowing AI research and development? There are some ongoing government ‘oversight’ investigations, but little is being done to this point to stop the ever-increasing speed of AI.
Do you think that’s good or bad? Please share your thoughts in the Comments section below. I’ll continue to report on AI issues in this Substack Newsletter and Notes during the coming months.
Next Newsletter
I’ll look at ‘Investigative Journalism and The Basics of Uncovering What's Hidden’ in the next Real Journalism newsletter.
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The purpose of this newsletter is to help people who work in the fields of journalism, media, and communications find ways to do their jobs that are personally fulfilling and helpful to others. I also want to help news consumers know how to find news sources they can trust.