Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for many decades, but has now become a buzzword even among non-technical people due to generative AI models such as ChatGPT, Bard, Scribe, Claude, DALL ·E 2 and many others. AI has moved beyond its sci-fi origins to reality, creating human-like content and powering self-driving cars. However, despite its extraordinary potential, irresponsible use of AI can lead to bias, discrimination, privacy violations, and other societal harms.
Given the growing ethical concerns and other potential risks posed by AI-generated content, many governments, including the Biden administration and the European Union, are establishing guidelines and frameworks to ensure the safe and responsible development and use of AI applications. Here we will discuss the ethical issues raised by generative AI models and some proven solutions.
Ethical concerns raised by AI generation models
The evolution of generative AI has led to a rapid increase in the number of lawsuits related to the development and use of these applications. Here are some critical ethical concerns influenced by AI technology.
Societal bias and discrimination
The content generated by AI models is only as good as the training data. As a result, results produced by models trained on low-quality training data can be biased and discriminatory, leading to public backlash, costly legal battles, and brand damage.
A report published in Bloomberg reveals widespread gender and racial bias in around 8,000 professional images created by three popular AI applications, viz. Stable streaming, Midjourney and DALL-E 2.
Deepfakes
AI tools can be used to create convincing image, audio and video hoaxes. Content created by sophisticated models is often indistinguishable from real content. Deepfakes are used to spread hate speech, mislead people, and distort public opinion.
Copyright issue
Generative AI applications trained on data extracted from online sources have been accused of copyright and intellectual property infringement.
AI Regulations
Many governments, including the European Union (EU) and the Biden administration, have proposed regulatory frameworks for artificial intelligence.
- EU regulations on AI: The European Union’s proposed bill to regulate the use of AI highlights safeguards for law enforcement agencies regarding the adoption of AI applications in EU countries. EU, restrictions on the use of AI for user manipulation and limitations on the use of biometric identification tools. Consumers can file complaints against any violation or invasion of their privacy. The law also proposes financial sanctions of up to €35 million, or 7% of a company’s overall turnover, for non-compliance with the regulations.
- White House Executive Order on AI: The Executive Order (or EO) on AI issued by US President Biden focuses on the safe and reliable development and use of AI tools. New standards for responsible adoption of AI were outlined in the order, along with guidelines for protecting intellectual property and user privacy.
Strategies for safe and secure AI application
Here are some strategies to mitigate the ethical and security challenges of AI applications.
- External audits: Companies building AI models should partner with an AI data solutions company, like Cogito Tech, for external audits. The Cogito Red Team The service offers solutions for adversarial testing, vulnerability scanning, bias auditing and response refinement.
- Licensed training data: Allowed training data can prevent copyright and intellectual property infringement problems. Licensed data is obtained through a legal process in accordance with copyright laws. Cogito offers the DataSum service to address the ethical challenges of AI for complex data governance and compliance needs.
Last words
Artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, has revolutionized the way we interact with technology in recent years. It holds extraordinary potential to make businesses more productive, innovative and secure. However, misuse of AI or a data-biased AI model can trigger a whole host of problems. ethical and safety concerns including bias, discrimination, copyright and privacy violation, misinformation, and even pose national security risks.
Recognizing and addressing these challenges is crucial to harnessing AI wisely and reaping great benefits.
