BBC Ideas｜关于人工智能，你一定要知道这5件事！

5 Things You Really Need to Know About AI

Every day, it seems, there's a new, bewildering or frightening story about AI in the news – how it's going to steal our jobs, spread internet fakery on a colossal scale and generally take over the world. But what exactly is AI – artificial intelligence – and are the scare stories even true?

1. AI is as old as your grandparents.

So the first thing to know is that AI has been around a lot longer than you might think. Its roots lie in an idea known as an "artificial neural network" from the 1940s. A neural network is a bit like a team of interconnected workers that learn to solve problems. Each time they come up with a possible solution, it's marked. If there is room for improvement, they adjust and change their connections.

Over time, the network becomes more efficient. And technology powered by neural networks is all around us right now. It suggests movies and music we might like. It recognises faces and objects when taking photos on smartphones, enabling features like facial recognition. It's heavily used by social media platforms to personalise our feeds.

More recently, a form of AI known as "generative AI" is powering applications that can seemingly create new data. It can also power chatbots like Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard, which give humanlike responses to questions. These are getting better at interacting with us, and seemingly more humanlike.

2. AI can't feel or think.

If you ask ChatGPT a question like this one – "Why should we be concerned about AI?" – it does a pretty good job of providing a response that appears logical. And with that convincing humanlike response, it's easy for us to believe it understands what it's saying, that it has feelings and motivations.

It's understandable that we do this, but it's worth remembering, right now, AI can't think or feel, can't love or hate. ChatGPT and its counterparts are sophisticated sentence-completion apps that analyse our patterns of communication and provide responses similar to the way humans would typically reply.

3. AI makes stuff up.

Chatbots can have an awkward relationship with the truth, technically known as "AI hallucinations". You could also describe it as "making stuff up". The core of the technology is a model that uses probability to predict the next word, sentence or paragraph. It can generate seemingly plausible replies, but lacks the ability to assess truthfulness or the accuracy of its responses.

So anyone thinking of using chatbots to write content needs to be careful they're not incorporating credible-sounding BS that can be easily spotted by someone who's actually done the research.

4. AI can sound racist and sexist.

The idea of a racist machine might seem far-fetched. But if AI is trained on data that's racist, biased or hateful, then its output will be too. As we all know, racism, bias and hateful content can be found in abundance online.

In 2016, Microsoft launched an experimental chatbot called Tay, but quickly pulled the plug after it made racist and offensive remarks. It learnt to do this from interacting with users on social media. Microsoft apologized and promised to implement improved safety features in future.

This is why the ethical framework that governs any AI application is incredibly important, and why many are calling for safeguards to prevent bias and hate speech to be built into AI systems.

5. AI has incredible potential.

For all the notes of caution, it can be easy to forget there's many potential benefits to AI. It's set to truly revolutionise healthcare. AI has already discovered new drugs and is being used to identify cancer cells much more reliably than humans. And AI chatbots can behave like patient teachers when we struggle to understand a complex topic, summarising huge volumes of information for us.

The AI revolution has the potential to enhance and speed up work in many fields, from software programming, to animation, to law enforcement and journalism. This has pluses and minuses, of course, but could this extra capacity free us up to do other things? Like tackling climate change or looking after ourselves and each other better?

As AI advances, governments and regulators will of course need to make sure it's being used ethically and legally – no easy feat. But will AI take over the world? Don't forget, AI is a tool, and even a powerful tool can't take over the world on its own. It's up to us to decide how we use it – or even if we should use it at all.



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