Commentary: Enough gushing about AI, we need to pause and think about its dangers

SINGAPORE: Unless you have been living under a rock, you would not have failed to register the collective swooning over artificial intelligence (AI) platforms such as ChatGPT recently. These so-called chat-bots have been treated like shiny new baubles around the world, but, in my view, more so in Singapore.

Of course, the wonders of AI have been making the rounds for some time now, mostly in tech-nerd circles. But ChatGPT and its ilk have propelled the discussion into the open. Hardly a day goes by without someone expressing amazement over what these systems, based on natural language processing techniques, can do.

There has been little discussion, however, of the dangers involved. Sure, there have been some words of caution, including in pieces published by local media, but these have mostly been of the type that seek to counter outlandish Terminator-type theories about how machines will take over the world.

By and large, the pros have outnumbered the cons, and the din encouraging all and sundry to adopt some form of AI is getting louder.

GREAT FOR THE MUNDANE AND ROUTINE

To be sure, ChatGPT is a great tool that comes in handy for all sorts of things, mundane and otherwise. I have been using it for a while, for everything from getting recipes for family dinners (a recent request for one for paella indicated I should use Arborio rice, which, frankly, would have left much of Spain in revolt), to summarising long documents and getting quick backgrounders on areas of interest in my day job.

Its potential for minimising the need to carry out the mundane and routine parts of many jobs is sky-high, leaving humans to figure out the creative or other, more important, aspects of work.

Senior Minister of State Janil Puthucheary for Communications and Information said as much recently in Parliament. Touching on the work of a team tasked with integrating ChatGPT into Microsoft Word, he said: “… we see potential in helping civil servants with parts of the writing process, such as summarising long reference material, exploring related ideas or improving the clarity of writing.”

That’s a worthy goal, no doubt – apart from “improving the clarity of writing”, but that’s a story for another day.