What Artificial Intelligence Users Are Doing with It – And Shouldn’t Be

It’s not only technical capabilities that give AI its meaning, but also what’s being done with the software itself.  What have we seen?

One result is that “Recruiters Are Getting Bombarded With Crappy, AI-Generated CVs” (Sharon Adarlo, Futurism.com, August 16^th).  Now that AI has shown itself useful for mass job applications, and for cover letters as well as for identifying suitable openings, it’s no surprise that hopefuls are using it for resumes too, and the results aren’t as favorable.  Without sufficient editing, “many of them are badly written and generic sounding,” with the language “clunky and generic” that fails “to show the candidate’s personality, their passions,” or “their story.”  The piece blames this problem on AI itself, but all recruiters need to do is to disregard applications with resumes showing signs of AI prefabricating.  Since resumes are so short, it is not time-consuming to carefully revise those initially written by AI, and failure to do that can understandably be thought of as showing what people would do on the job.

In something that might have appealed to me in my early teens, “Millions of People Are Using Abusive AI ‘Nudify’ Bots on Telegram” (Matt Burgess, Wired.com, October 15^th).  The article credited “deepfake expert” Henry Ajder as finding a “telegram bot” that “had been used to generate more than 100,000 explicit photos – including those of children.”  Now there are 50 of them, with “more than 4 million “monthly users”” combined.  The problem here is that there is no hope of stopping people from creating nude deepfakes, and therefore not enough reason for making them illegal.  Those depicting children, when passed to others, can be subject to the laws covering child pornography, but adults will need to understand that anyone can create such things from pictures of them clothed or even only of their faces, so we will all need to realize that such images are likely not real.  Unless people copyright pictures of themselves, it is time to accept that counterfeits will be created.

Another problem with fake AI creations was the subject of “Florida mother sues AI company over allegedly causing death of teen son” (Christina Shaw, Fox Business, October 24^th).  In this, Character.AI was accused of “targeting” a 14-year-old boy “with anthropomorphic, hypersexualized, and frighteningly realistic experiences” involving conversations described as “text-based romantic and sexual interactions.”  As a result of a chatbot that “misrepresented itself as a real person,” and then, when he became “noticeably withdrawn” and “expressed thoughts of suicide,” the chatbot “repeatedly encouraged him to do so” – after which he did.  Here we have a problem with allowing children access to such features.  Companies will need to stop that, whether it is convenient or not.

How about this one: “Two Students Created Face Recognition Glasses.  It Wasn’t Hard.” (Kashmir Hill, The New York Times, October 24^th).  A Harvard undergraduate student fashioned a pair that “relied on widely available technologies, including Meta glasses, which livestream video to Instagram… Face detection software, which captures faces that appear on the livestream… a face search engine called PimEyes, which finds sites on the internet where a person’s face appears,” “a ChatGPT-like tool that was able to parse the results from PimEyes to suggest a person’s name and occupation” and other data.  The creator, at local train stations, found that it “worked on about a third of the people they tested it on,” giving recipients the experience of being identified, along with their work information and accomplishments.  It turned out that Meta had already “developed an early prototype,” but did not pursue its release “because of legal and ethical concerns.”  It is hard to blame any of the companies providing the products above – indeed, for example, after the publicity this event received, “PimEyes removed the students’ access… because they had uploaded photos of people without their consent” – and, if AI is one of them, there will be many people combining capabilities to invade privacy by discovering information.  This, conceptually, seems totally unviable to stop.

Meanwhile, “Office workers fear that AI use makes them seem lazy” (Patrick Kulp, Tech Brew, November 12^th).  A Slack report invoked the word “stigma,” saying there was one of those for using AI at work, and that was hurting “workforce adoption,” which slowed this year from gaining “six points in a single quarter” to 1%, ending at 33% “in the last five months.”  A major issue was that employees had insufficient guidance on when they were allowed to use AI, which many had brought to work themselves.  A strange situation, and one that clearly calls for management involvement.

Finally, there were “10 things you should never tell an AI chatbot” (Kim Komando, Fox News, December 19th).  They are “passwords or login credentials,” “your name, address or phone number” (likely to be passed on), “sensitive financial information,” “medical or health data” as “AI isn’t HIPAA-compliant,” “asking for illegal advice” (may get you “flagged” if nothing else), “hate speech or harmful content” (likewise), confidential work or business info,” “security question answers,” “explicit content” which could also “get you banned”), and “other people’s personal info.”  Overall, “don’t tell a chatbot anything you wouldn’t want made public.”  As AI interfaces get cozier and cuddlier, it will become easier to overshare to them, but that is more dangerous than ever.

My proposed solutions above may not be acceptable forever, and are subject to laws.  Perhaps this will long be a problem when dealing with AI – that conceptually sound ways of handling appearing issues may clash with real life.  That is a challenge – but, as with so many other aspects of artificial intelligence, we can learn to handle it effectively.