Angelus News | June 30, 2023 | Vol. 8 No 13

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THE FUTURE’S NEW FRONTIER Nadia Thalmann, right, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, talks to a humanoid that she and her team created in 2016. With her brown hair, soft skin, and expressive face, the humanoid is a new brand of robot that could one day, scientists hope, be used as a personal assistant or care provider for the elderly. | CNS/EDGAR SU, REUTERS Artificial intelligence can mimic our voices, dress the pope in Balenciaga, and control parts of our brains. Will it help humanity, or doom it? BY ELISE ITALIANO URENECK Artificial intelligence (AI) has dominated news headlines in recent months, particularly revelations and claims about how the technology works, what it’s doing now, and what it could do in the future. AI promises to transform areas of daily life such as work, health care, and education. Because AI has the capacity to change the way human beings interact with the world and with one another, leaders are asking for boundaries to ensure its ethical use and to prevent catastrophe in the form of regulation. In order to better understand AI’s promises and perils, Angelus spoke to two Catholics who have tracked the technology’s rise from different places: Justin Welter, senior vice president of Gaming at software publishing group Bidstack, has worked in marketing and advertising in Silicon Valley for almost two decades, including for Facebook and Google. Joseph Vukov is a philosophy professor at Loyola University in Chicago, whose research has focused on philosophy of mind and neuroethics. Elise Ureneck: Let’s start by establishing a common definition of artificial intelligence. I understand it to be a computing process that uses algorithms to recognize patterns in large datasets and present them back to the user in an ordered, coherent way. Am I missing anything? Justin Welter: It’s statistics at a massive scale. You have all kinds of 12 • ANGELUS • June 30, 2023
information that’s coming in, and these large language models say, “Statistically we believe that the next thing should be this” … whether that’s a word, equation, or code. They determine what the next logical step would be. Joseph Vukov: I would add that what counts as the “next step” varies from model to model. They are trained to do a specific task, so the next successful step is going to be relative to what you’re trying to get it to do. Something like ChatGPT (Open AI’s generative tool) is trained to produce human-like language, so what counts as success is whether or not the output looks like something that a human would write. It’s not trained to do other sorts of things like track the truth or create meaningful speech. Ureneck: Where is AI already deployed? Ureneck: There’s a lot of talk about the promises and perils of AI. The New York Times, for example, has written about technology that could help “read the minds” of people who are unable to speak by mapping how parts of their brain light up — this is obviously promising. On the other hand, nearly every developer giving interviews has said something to the effect of, “If you’re not scared about what AI might do, something’s wrong.” What’s exciting to you about AI? What’s scary about it? Vukov: I think there’s potential for AI to provide capacities to people who don’t otherwise have them. The tool in that Times story you mentioned, for example, was able to pick up on the semantics of words. It’s an exciting application for somebody who is unable to speak. swaying people’s opinions? Welter: My biggest fear is around the question, “What is truth?” The thing that scares me the most is pictures, like Midjourney, a tool that allows you to create any photo. It was used to create that famous picture of the pope and the Balenciaga jacket. What’s going to be interesting is what is real and what is not, which includes voices, too. Our iPhones have a new accessibility feature where you record your voice for 15 minutes and then Siri begins speaking in your voice. I’m worried about having my voice recorded anywhere, including my voicemail. If my voice can be recorded and manipulated or recreated, it could be used for things like accessing bank accounts. My voice is my fingerprint and security code. There’s going to be regulation. Google, Facebook … they’re all going Welter: Google’s use of predictive text in email, in which Gmail offers suggested text to complete sentences based on algorithms, is one example. When it comes to the advertising space, it’s still to be determined where AI will land. I’m struggling to concretely understand the difference between artificial intelligence and machine learning. We use a lot of machine learning algorithms in online advertising to determine what type of ads are pertinent to show someone. We also use it for tracking, to understand and ensure that who we targeted downloaded an app versus someone else. Wherever there’s an opportunity to make money, there’s going to be more development. Vukov: AI is also operating behind the scenes, which raises important ethical questions. In health care systems, it can do things like read charts. It turns out that certain machine learning algorithms are better than radiologists at picking out differences between some types of scans. There’s talk about using AI to help triage patients to determine which tests to order or what a diagnosis might look like. Given things like the biases that can factor into algorithms, these are things that we need to have our eyes on. AI could affect the way that health care is administered. “Original sin is probably more powerful than AI, and that’s ultimately where the battle will be.” There are also possible applications for prosthetics. Elon Musk has been touting one of his many projects called Neuralink, a computer chip that goes into your brain. An algorithm could help you communicate with your prosthetic and move about better than current prosthetics allow. My biggest worry is the erosion of trust that’s so essential to community and democratic life. You see this already in education, like the question: How do we know if essays were written by a student or ChatGPT? There’s an undermining of trust in the professor-student relationship. You can see how this will affect other relationships. We’re going to start to ask, “Am I interacting with a person or a chat bot?” “How can I tell if what’s written is by an AI or by a person?” Lastly, there’s this really big worry about how models are getting trained. Are those who are training the models providing — intentionally or unintentionally — misleading information? I might assume a tool was trained on information that’s pertinent to the topic I’m exploring, when it actually wasn’t. Could that lead to a covert way of to want regulation, because it’ll allow for them to move forward without having to address the public’s fears. I think there will be requirements for watermarks — every picture or thing created will have to have some type of watermark that says, “Made by AI.” And there are a lot of trust issues with the media as it is. You can’t imagine how that will be amplified if anybody can go on the internet, create their own truth, put it on Twitter and claim, “This is what is happening in the Middle East or in Ukraine right now.” Ureneck: How do you see AI affecting education? Welter: I think it’s going to be interesting for careers like engineering. We’ll likely lower the bar for engineering or coding. Will it make sense to go to coding school for one year when you can learn how to code pretty simply on ChatGPT or Bard [Google’s generative AI tool]? I also think AI will widen the gap between public education and private education. Private schools can afford to have a maximum ratio of 1 to 30 June 30, 2023 • ANGELUS • 13
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Angelus News | June 30, 2023 | Vol. 8 No 13

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