AI can be abused, but John Oliver is unjustly concerned about ChatGPT
i love john oliver And not just because we both come from the land of fish and chips, Morrissey and Monty Python.
I’m a little ashamed to admit how many of my opinions are shaped in part by his thinking. The TV host has an intelligent, well-researched and irreverent approach to the news that makes sense in a complicated world.
But not when it comes to artificial intelligence.
John Oliver railed against AI in Last Week Tonight
During a recent episode of his popular Sunday night talk show on HBO, “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver criticized the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning models, particularly the Microsoft-funded chatbot ChatGPT.
“The problem with AI right now,” Oliver said, “isn’t that it’s intelligent. It’s that it’s stupid in ways we can’t always predict. That’s a real problem because we’re increasingly using AI in all sorts of meaningful ways.”
Such comments are unfair. AI is useful in many different fields, including education and finance, and major language models like ChatGPT and Google’s LaMDA and Bard are impressive in the number of jobs they can do.
The ability to quickly generate relevant information is useful, for example, when creating content such as the “Help” function on a website.
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AI is also useful to support customer service. People want to feel like they are interacting with a human while taking care of them quickly. AI helps achieve that experience, and in a world where so many of our interactions are remote, it matters.
It is also important to understand that the models are evolving. Like Siri and Alexa, they get smarter as they receive more content from a wider audience.
To be fair, Oliver made some valid points. The proliferation of AI models highlights challenges that more people should be talking about. For example, ChatGPT and other AI programs are great for cleaning code. But since developers from all over the world are using ChatGPT to clean up code, they are actually giving away intellectual property by feeding the chatbot.
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AI can be abused, but there are solutions
Another major problem is black-box AI technology, which lacks transparency in how it makes decisions and, in turn, is not responsible for spreading misinformation. Now even someone with limited technical experience can download widely used black box AI models like XGBoost from the internet and figure out how to train them.
But they will have no idea why the model made the decisions it does, and whether bias and misinformation skewed the results.
In his 28-minute rant, Oliver warned of the dangers of black-box AI. He noted, “AI systems need to be explainable, which means we should be able to understand exactly how and why an AI arrived at its answers.”
He failed to mention that there is a more transparent and secure alternative to black box systems. Silent Eight has established itself as a leader in AI by developing pioneering white-box financial crime identification solutions for leading banks such as HSBC, Standard Chartered and First Abu Dhabi.
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Our flagship platform, Iris, is fully explainable, telling you how and why it made a particular decision. Similar models exist in a variety of industries beyond finance.
You will find complex, groundbreaking models with clear explanations of why a specific result is achieved. But they are not widely available or easy to download from the internet. These tools are methodically developed, monitored, tuned, measured, and tested by experienced mathematicians, data scientists, subject matter experts, and risk and compliance analysts.
Intelligent machine learning and AI technology are valuable technologies that have become indispensable in the modern world. While you should never use black box AI to make decisions that have legal ramifications or serious consequences, that doesn’t mean you can’t apply complex, state-of-the-art, and transparent solutions to improve the decision-making process in critical industries.
I don’t think the general public needs to worry about black box solutions. ChatGPT is an impressive technological advance that will be invaluable to a variety of industries.
Tell that to John Oliver.
Matthew Leaney is Chief Revenue Officer of Silent Eight, which uses artificial intelligence to fight cybercrime.
