Five (5) Biggest Ethical Concerns for AI

AI brings about the ability to automate mundane and sometimes even complex tasks. With this in mind, many begin to question if AI will replace workers in due time. AI has proven itself to be able to take over some assembly line work and repetitive high risk, accuracy and precision jobs (such as making circuit boards and semiconductors). With these in mind it is understandable why many are concerned, but this brings about the questions:

• Is AI efficient enough to completely replace human judgment and ability?
• Will AI create a better work environment for Human workers?

Overall, workers should think of AI as a custom tool rather than a replacement.

With Art Generating AI such as Open AI’s Stable Diffusion and Midjourney Beta rising in popularity, many artists and art lovers were both amazed and upset simultaneously. The generated art is created by feeding the AI with pre-existing images. These images include photos of real people, landscapes, animals, and other publicly available artist’s work. This raised many eyebrows as there was a trend of AI generated art that had strong resemblance to artist’s work. Furthermore, while the original database may not contain an artist’s work, since the AI is publicly available for people to use, many took the art of their favorite artists and “fixed” it as they saw fit using AI, some even labeling it as their own original work. This begs the following questions:

• How and should we control the use of AI generated art?
• Should AI generated art actually be considered as art?
• Should Artists be paid royalties when their art is used in an AI database?

AI such as ChatGPT that can write code,stories,recipes, and the countless other AI chat bots that can mimic human conversations exceptionally well really showcase just how intelligent AI can be. While some are amused by the advancement we have made with AI many believe that this will be more harm than good. With the media mentioning Facebook's AI that was shut down due to the AI “speaking to each other in a language only they understand” and many other updates of researchers claiming that soon their AI projects will approach consciousness , the fear of our own creations possibly hating their creators is ever-present. Even if these AI are appreciative of their existence , many question how they should be treated,as equals or as tools? Furthermore, how do we determine their treatment and should all AI be treated this way since they are regarded as intelligent beings?

As mentioned previously, the concept of AI replacing workers is a big concern. In cases of manufacturers utilizing automated systems in order to carry out mundane and repetitive tasks (hence no need to pay human workers for said tasks), how will the wealth be distributed across the company’s human workers.Will the rest of the workers in the company be offered a higher pay rate or will the pay rate remain the same and the wealth stays with the company?

Where you have technology, you will also have hackers. While it is much harder to manipulate a human worker into doing something malicious, especially if it puts the worker at risk, it is much easier to manipulate an AI to carry out malicious tasks or steal data. AI has also been utilized in order to generate phishing emails. Therefore, while AI technology can be utilized to make work easier and faster, it also serves as a powerful automation tool for hackers in order to carry out DDos attacks. This begs the questions, how and can we prevent AI from being utilized maliciously?

While AI has many advantages in the new tech driven world, concerns cannot be avoided. New innovations and government policies may come into play and more questions will be formulated as AI technology advances even further.

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