Revolutionising society: How AI is changing the world

By Ian Chan

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk, Courtesy of Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-robot-holding-a-cup-8439093/

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving field that seeks to develop intelligent machines that can perform tasks that typically would require human intellect. Advancements in computer technology and data analytics have revolutionized the field of AI, making it possible for machines to learn from experience and adapt to changing situations. Over the years, AI has gradually become more sophisticated, with machine learning algorithms becoming more efficient and intelligent. Today, AI is being employed in various industries and has shown immense potential to transform the way we live and work.

In case you didn’t notice, the paragraph above is not written by a person, but rather by artificial intelligence. The entire opening paragraph above was simply written by the famous chatbot, ChatGPT. This chatbot is very well known for its remarkable writing capabilities, with it being able to produce written text types with the competency of a human. While this is one example of how Artificial Intelligence is being used positively there are still other uses that it can fulfil. So, where is Artificial Intelligence being used today? And how are they changing the world that we live in right now?

The banking industry greatly benefits from the usage of AI due to different factors that contribute to a successful bank. The first main area in which Artificial Intelligence can help is in recording transactions. In the US alone there are on average more than 108.6 million transactions done per day. This makes it quite difficult for bookkeepers to record all the transactions done on a daily basis. However, with the utilisation of Artificial Intelligence, the recording of these transactions can be done in mere seconds as compared to a large group of bookkeepers, which might take hours. 

Banks can also use Artificial Intelligence to track the latest market trends and predict the future. This is mainly due to how the utilisation of AI in this field allows for it to notice patterns in stock fluctuations or other market trends which humans might not be aware of, and then make a graph to predict what might occur. This allows for those who are actively trading stock or thinking of getting into the stock market to easily evaluate the potential benefits and risks of investing in stock.

But it’s not just sorting out data that AI can help with, as AI can also be applied to customer service. In fact, according to the Washington Post, Morgan Stanley, a financial services company, has recently been testing the possibility of using ChatGPT as a customer service robot. This allows for those who are actively working in the customer service industry to be reserved for much more unique and challenging issues too difficult for the chatbot to solve.

However, despite all the positive impacts that Artificial Intelligence can leave on the banking and finance industry there are still some glaring downsides. One of the main downsides to the implementation of AI is the possibility of it simply generating claims or information that might be incomprehensible or simply illogical to humans. This is due to how the AI will gather large quantities of information and spot potential patterns that the average customer cannot. This will lead to the information being outputted by the AI being almost incoherent to the average customer. An example of this could be that the AI spots a difficult-to-comprehend pattern with customers taking a loan, and then refuses to give a loan to a long-time customer.

Another of the most popular forms of AI in today’s market, generation AI, is capable of producing images, conversational text, essays, code, and many other forms of text or images. This has great implications for writing in general, with journalism being one of the main examples of how AI is revolutionising how we write. 

Chatbots such as ChatGPT have been used to create frameworks for articles. Users ask the chatbot about structuring an article given a specific topic. In fact, in an interview with the Washington Post Jonathan Nelson, the senior digital marketing manager of growth for the American Marketing Association, he states:

“You have AI write a 1,000-word article, and then go through and edit it to make it sound human again, it’s a framework for articles.” (Abril, 2023)

While this quote does make human journalists sound obsolete, the truth is the need for human journalists will not change. The current capabilities of AI can only produce very general descriptions of events in the world—the validity of which is also questionable. This could potentially cause issues regarding the spreading of false information that people might believe to be true. 

The pure accessibility of this technology would lead to ordinary people having the capability to simply ask an AI to generate an article with the intention to spread misinformation. For example, people could have a chatbot generate articles that link two different topics together using false information and baseless claims. According to an article from the New York Times, Gordon Crovitz of NewsGuard, an online misinformation tracking company, states:

“Crafting a new false narrative can now be done at dramatic scale, and much more frequently — it’s like having A.I. agents contributing to disinformation.” (Hsu & Thompson, 2023)

This means that the need for human journalists will still persist, as they will be required to validate any claims made by the artificially generated articles and rewrite or remove any false claims.

Healthcare is yet another area that will greatly change with the implementation of AI. This is due to how Artificial Intelligence excels in the organisation and analysis of information, which is perfect for institutions such as hospitals or banks. Artificial Intelligence could be used for recording a patient's health history and potentially even predict future diseases that the patient might struggle with. Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence has the capability to monitor patients’ vitals. Due to AI not requiring the need to rest, monitoring patients for sudden fluctuations in their state of well-being during the night could prove to be very useful in saving a patient's life. 

Artificial intelligence can once again also be used in customer support for hospitals. This is due to AI having the capability to obtain a vast quantity of medical information, and then serve as a sort of digital doctor. What this means is that people could log onto a website or app connected to an AI and ask it some simple medical questions regarding their well-being, whether that be suggesting a potential diagnosis or the best medicine to treat their symptoms. 

This allows for hospitals and doctors to be reserved for much more serious cases that AI cannot solve by itself. For example, AI can help with diagnosing and giving medical advice to those with simple illnesses such as a fever or a cold. However, if the patient has a broken bone or has contracted a much more serious disease such as cancer, the patient can then be directed to the hospital for more serious medical treatment.

All these benefits above show that AI can be a positive tool to help people in the medical field. However, the implementation of AI opens up new problems that had not existed in the past. One example of this would be the possibility of adversarial attacks on the AI. Adversarial attacks are a type of digital attack where a hacker manipulates the data which the AI model uses to generate an output. This causes the AI to output incorrect or unexpected answers rather than the original intended output. In the context of issuing a diagnosis to a patient, this manipulation of data can cause the AI to issue a false or wildly exaggerated diagnosis. 

Overall, Artificial Intelligence is having a profound impact on the world we live in today. The technology strives to allow people to complete mundane and simple tasks much quicker than usual, and spend more time focusing on other more important areas of their lives. Despite this, AI still has its shortcomings, ranging from economic to ethical issues regarding the usage of AI in everyday life. Of course, the main debatable downside to AI is the possibility of it replacing people’s role in society. 

While it cannot be denied that AI does indeed have the capabilities to completely automate and replace some jobs done by humans, this does not mean that those jobs will disappear. It is most likely that due to this most jobs we see today will adapt to co-exist with the rise of AI.