Generative AI products that can respond to increasingly complex prompts with text, images, video or audio continue to be developed at pace.
Chatbots have evolved from simple assistants into chatty companions, image generators have become dangerously good at making photorealistic content and new advanced models are said to be surfacing decades-old software bugs.
Such advances, praised and scrutinised in equal measure, are still also accompanied by warnings to users of the tech’s limitations and dangers of relying on it.
Rodgers said with previous online tools such as Wikipedia, “if you were interested in something you could perhaps go back to a fundamental source and check it… and see whether or not you found something that was reliable”.
Such information can be omitted in quick AI responses, he added, meaning “you’re getting more and more distanced from relatable or checkable information”.
According to Dr Anuschka Schmitt, assistant professor of information systems at the London School of Economics, “the harmful and unintended consequences of technology, including overreliance, are nothing new”.
But conversational AI systems capable of performing many tasks, in a human-like way, have “dramatically reduced the barrier for humans to forego cognitive effort and engagement for work, learning, and leisure,” she told the BBC.
Dr Schmitt said with studies of so-called “cognitive outsourcing” revealing “how competencies, memory and learning are quickly but negatively impacted by the use of contemporary AI,” it was important to consider when and where to use it.
Nevertheless, generative AI tools that present us with information we do not have to find ourselves are on the rise.
AI Overviews have now replaced snippets or lists of links at the top of Google search results, with similar experiments appearing on social platforms like TikTok and X.
Leave a comment