Our relationship with tools powered by artificial intelligence has been honeymooning for the past few weeks.
Many of us have prodded the bot, which can generate responses with startlingly natural language, with tasks like writing stories about our pets and coding software programs.
Many people have uploaded selfies to an app that transforms ordinary photos into artistic depictions. A few weeks ago, both of them appeared.
A.I. is like social networks when they first appeared. It is always the case with new technology that there will be drawbacks and painful lessons.
The people who were experimenting with the tool realized that they could use it to win contests. The students have been caught plagiarizing essays. Some women who uploaded their photos to Lensa were made to look younger or nude.
We have reached a turning point with artificial intelligence and now is a good time to think about how to use it ethically and safely.
For a long time, virtual assistants were the butt of jokes because they weren't really helpful. Many people are considering how to fit the tools into their daily lives and occupations now that modern A.I. is good enough.
Brian Christian is a computer scientist and author of a book about ethical concerns surrounding A.I systems. In the immediate term, what is the future of homework for the education system?
We can take advantage of the smarts of these tools without putting ourselves or others at risk.
Understand how the technology works to know what you're doing with it.
It's a more powerful version of the predictive text system on our phones, which suggests words to complete a sentence when we are typing by using what it has learned from vast amounts of data on the internet.
It can't check if what it says is true.
It looks at how the code was compiled in the past if you use a chatbot to code. Mr. Christian said that the code written with a chatbot could be buggy or vulnerable.
If you use the bot to write an essay about a classic book, there is a good chance that the bot will make plausible arguments. It's possible that a faulty analysis of the book on the web will show up in your essay. The spread of misinformation would be made worse if your essay was posted online.
Melanie Mitchell is a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute.
The bot doesn't think on it's own It can't be counted.
When I asked the author of the haiku to write about the cold weather in San Francisco, I was shocked. The lines were spat out with the wrong number of vowels.
Fog blankets the city,
Brisk winds chill to the bone,
Winter in San Fran.
Openai did not comment for this column.
Similar to A.I.-powered image-editing tools, Lensa trains their algorithm with existing images on the web. The machines will recreate that bias if women are presented in more sexualized contexts.
The developer of Lensa said it was just using what was out there. Anna Green said that A.I. holds a mirror to our society.
The concern is that if you use the tool to create a cartoon, it will base the image on the style of the work of other artists.
We have learned many times that when we use an online tool, we have to give up some data.
It would probably be wise to exercise caution if you wanted to share sensitive texts with the chatbot, it said when asked if it was safe to do so.
The company said that it deleted images from its server after a day. Photos that you want to keep private should not be uploaded.
Fight for the Future is a digital rights advocacy group that believes in helping the robots by giving them what they need. It should be assumed that the company can access it.
A.I. can help if we need a light assist. A person could ask a robot to change a paragraph. Before sending an email, a nonnative English speaker could ask for the email to be removed from their inbox. The bot could suggest ways to make an essay more persuasive.
Don't rely on the bot in those situations.
Ms. Mitchell said that you need a human in the loop to make sure that they are telling the truth and not lying.
She said that if you decide to use a tool like ChatGPT or Lensa to produce a piece of work, it's a good idea to let the world know about it. It's similar to giving credit to other authors.
The entire column was written and fact checked by humans, but the ninth paragraph was edited by a person.
A person contributed reporting.
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