The impact of Generative AI is everywhere — just take a look around.
If you look past ChatGPT, you see products like Adobe Photoshop incorporating it into their tools. Want a lighthouse in your desert photograph? Generate it. Want to know what Harry Potter would look like in anime form? Generate it.
Your productivity note-taking app will summarise your notes for you, edit your writing tone, fix your grammar. Your mobile-phone will generate text-to-speech in the likeness of your own voice.
Beyond everyday consumer use, Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) is proving its potential to be enormously helpful. For pharmaceutical companies, Gen AI could design proteins for medicines, which will solve a massive challenge that has plagued geneticists and pharmaceutical developers for decades. In manufacturing, Gen AI can create machine parts and optimise design to minimise waste and increase speed and efficiency.
In fact, Gen AI could be the invisible hand that shapes what we interact with in the world around us —designing the buildings we work and sleep in, the parks we walk our dogs in, and the roads we commute upon.
Collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) is more impactful than it has ever been before. While the AI of the past was stagnant — you make a request, and whatever the AI outcome is, you take it or you leave it. With generative AI, there is back and forth to refine and redefine continually. This is collaboration in order to achieve specific results.
With Gen AI, be intentional with risk-taking
That is the key to Gen AI of the present – collaboration. It will take immense collaboration to mitigate the tidal wave of risks involved with generative AI. As we are discovering the capabilities of Gen AI in our everyday lives, we need to have data privacy, algorithmic bias, explainability, fairness, and accuracy on our radar.
Also Read: The Future of CRM: Transforming customer experience with Gen AI
It is almost certain that there are dangers we have yet to fathom. After all, we do not know what we do not know.
We will need true collaboration with fellow humans to ensure Gen AI will serve the good of society and be used as ethically as possible. As with any powerful, potentially dangerous tool, like cars and weapons, AI should be strictly regulated with frameworks to guide responsible development and deployment.
In March 2023, after calls by over 1,000 tech workers for a pause in the training of the most powerful AI systems, UNESCO called on all governments to fully implement its Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence immediately. The organisation argued that “industry self-regulation is clearly not sufficient to avoid ethical harms.”
The future of generative AI depends on how we behave today
A very real and conspicuous controversy shrouding Gen AI is how it is impacting jobs. Already, artists are using AI art generators, and writers and creators everywhere are disgruntled, anxious or apprehensive about Gen AI.
Stability AI’s Founder and CEO, Emad Mostaque, is convinced that AI will “create brand new industries”, which will “create loads of new jobs.” While that might be true, current jobs are already being displaced.
We need to be very careful. This phenomenon of technology displacing jobs is nothing new—people have argued that machines have been taking their jobs for decades now, but generative AI is growing at a furious pace, and the world is enamoured by it.
Currently, its main victim seems to be the creative industry, one of the few industries where everyone actually wants to do their job. It will be a bleak place if we replace the artists of the world with artificial intelligence.
Instead, we need to make sure AI pushes all of society forward. To replace mundane tasks to free up time for more meaningful work. To solve problems, we could not before. But it is not something that artificial intelligence can achieve on its own.
What it needs as guidelines is intentional, radical collaboration between humans. A shared understanding of what AI should be used for and how it should be used.
Education with collaboration
In order for this collaboration to happen, we will need mass education to prepare individuals for the future of work. Organisations like SGTech and SkillsFuture could collaborate and develop courses that introduce basic AI knowledge for people in all stages of life and their careers, and how they might use it for their benefit.
In order for Singapore to stay ahead of the curve, we need to learn fast. The Gen AI era is here to stay, and will only evolve and grow. To make sure our futures are bright, we will need collaboration that is regular, institutionalised, and designed with purpose.
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