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--:-- John Bickley: Following decades of development and billions of dollars in research, artificial intelligence or AI has fully burst into the mainstream, captivating people around the world and setting off a global race to implement the revolutionary technology in every facet of society. For this episode of Morning Wire, we talk to a number of experts about the future of artificial intelligence and the economic and ethical implications that come along with its development. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's February 12th, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
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--:-- John Bickley: Joining us to discuss the rise of AI is Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips. So Cabot, artificial intelligence conjures up a lot of different images for people, Skynet, for instance. So first, can we get a simple definition of the technology?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Absolutely. So AI is essentially just creating computer programs that can look at huge amounts of information and learn from them, predicting outcomes, noticing patterns, and generating answers to questions, among many, many other things. It's pretty complicated stuff.
--:-- John Bickley: So I talked to Dr. Luis Amaral. He's a professor of chemical and biological engineering who's currently researching AI at Northwestern University. Here's how he describes artificial intelligence.
--:-- Dr. Luis Amaral: So there are many versions of artificial intelligence, right? But the basic idea is that you want to use computers to be able to accomplish certain tasks. And the task can be, for instance, looking at an image and identifying what is it in that image. It could be to write a sentence in a given language. It could be translating text from one language to another. And there are a multitude of approaches and methods to do it. The one that is currently very popular and dominating the field is called deep learning. And it tries to imitate the neurons in the brain to kind of figure out how taking an input will generate something, some answer.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, recently, AI has exploded in popularity following the release of ChatGPT. Tell us about that.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, back in November, the tech company OpenAI released ChatGPT, which was a groundbreaking generative AI program, otherwise known as a chatbot. Anyone can go online and create a profile and ask the program virtually anything. And within seconds, it'll spit out an answer that's often indistinguishable from what a human would say. For example, if you ask, what is ChatGPT? It tells you it's, quote, a language model developed by OpenAI, trained to generate human-like text responses to questions and prompts.
--:-- Dr. Luis Amaral: So it is one instance of what's called large language models, which are deep learning models that have used text generated over millions and millions of hours of work from people around the world to sort of figure out what comes next after you see some text what would be the natural thing to come next. We've seen examples of computer programs answering basic questions and mimicking human conversations but there's never been a program quite like this for mass use.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Some industry leaders say that it's the most consequential tech product made available to the public since the iPhone debuted back in 2007. Yeah, it's really shaking the world here.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So beyond the fun stuff the program can do, what are the practical applications? Well, there are the obvious uses like customer service, where these new chatbots could help eliminate the need for massive call centers with hundreds of employees who can only take one call at a time. You could use the technology also to help with data entry and other monotonous research. It could help accountants and engineers. The list really does go on.
--:-- Dr. Luis Amaral: But ultimately, because we're in the early stages of development, we're still just not totally sure how to best use the technology. Let me give you a little bit of an analogy. So when physicists started studying electricity, it was used initially for rather silly things. So, you know, people would meet and then the person demonstrating things would just give the other people electrical shocks. And this was, oh, wow, this is so cool. And so a lot of the initial applications were completely ridiculous. People in the beginning didn't think about electrical engines, about lighting the houses and the streets. They didn't think about all the things that we now associate with electricity. I think AI is very much at that early stage.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Some of the things that we are using, it seems very, oh, how cool the thing can answer questions and do this and that. And I think this is overall mostly just silliness. This is just, we actually haven't figured out what it's going to be good for, and we are using it for what seems to be good for.
--:-- John Bickley: One place we've already seen the technology being used is academia, and that's got a lot of people worried. What have we seen on that front so far?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, look, it's no secret that there will always be students willing to cheat. But the problem is this new technology makes it incredibly difficult for teachers and professors to detect that cheating. For example, if a student turns in an essay and you think it may have been written by ChatGPT, you're not able to simply just copy and paste passages of that essay into Google to see if it appears elsewhere because it won't show up.
--:-- Dr. Lloyd Smith: I tried it on a more advanced class, and in that class, it did pretty well, but it made some errors. It made some mistakes. And it's not just freshman-level classes that AI is capable of passing. Chad GPT made waves earlier this year when researchers announced that it had passed high-level business courses at UPenn's Wharton School and law school exams at the University of Minnesota. It even passed large portions of the U.S. medical licensing exam and the bar exam as well.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Many researchers say it's only a matter of time before it passes the bar outright and outperforms humans on the MCAT as well.
--:-- Dr. Luis Amaral: I think there is a subset of people interested in AI that think of AI not as replacing humans, but augmenting human abilities. And to give you a simple analogy, you know, when people were developing software to play chess, computer programs to play chess, one of the things is that the computer programs at some point were able to beat the best human players. And so the best chess playing programs are way, way better than any human player. But an interesting thing is that if you put a human together with a computer, it becomes even better, right? So a human plus a computer can beat any computer program and can beat any other single human alone.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So there are ways in which we can use AI programs to help filter and do some processing of information that can make humans more powerful.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: As you mentioned, it's worth noting that there are a number of ethical concerns that come along with technology like this. What are some of those?
--:-- Dr. Luis Amaral: Well, as with any new technology, there's an arms race among competitors to be the first to make the biggest, best, the most successful product. But that rush to take the lead often means ignoring potential side effects of what that product will do and sort of throwing caution to the wind. We saw this early with social media. This tech giants rushed to fill the market. They created a whole set of ethical questions about free speech and censorship that weren't really addressed for years.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And we see even more concerns about AI. For example, there's the rise of deepfake technology, which uses AI to superimpose someone's face onto existing videos or pictures. That means that among other things, virtually anyone can create pornographic images of someone without their consent.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: We've also seen the technology used to create videos of celebrities or politicians appearing to say things that they never said. For example, here's Morgan Freeman, or at least the AI version of Morgan Freeman.
--:-- [Audio clip of AI-generated Morgan Freeman]
--:-- Cabot Phillips: I am not Morgan Freeman, and what you see is not real. What if I were to tell you that I am not even a human being? Would you believe me? What is your perception of reality?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And that will just only get more convincing as this technology advances. So you can see that this could clearly be very dangerous.
--:-- John Bickley: That's Daily Wire Senior Editor, Cabot Phillips, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
