2022: The Year Of AI Hopes And Horrors

2022 has been an interesting year with incredible developments, both positive and negative in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Many international leaders have consistently expressed concerns on the hopes or horrors that AI can unleash if humans are not careful in applying ethical AI practices, and also fundamentally thinking harder about the use cases and the societal impacts that AI could have on human civilization.

According to a Gartner study, the revenue from AI in 2022 will reach $62 billion. This is an increase of roughly a 21.3% increase from 2021. Despite the dynamics of the market, AI is continuing to evolve, grow and many outstanding AI innovations are advancing the betterment of human kind - giving us much hope.

Hope 1 - Generative AI

As I wrote in an earlier blog Generative AI is rapidly becoming a reality. Global AI investment has surged from $12.75 million in 2015 to $93.5 billion in 2021, and the market is projected to reach $422.37 billion by 2028.

Already over $2B has been invested in Generative AI, up 425% since 2020, according to the Financial Times. While generative AI presently accounts for only 1% of all data produced, Gartner predicts that by 2025, it will account for 10% of all data produced. Synthetic data accounts for 60% of the amount of data used for AI and analytics solutions in the next two years.

Generative AI refers to machine learning algorithms that can create new meaning from text, images, code, and other forms of content. Leading generative AI tools are: DeepMind’s Alpha Code (GoogleLab), OpenAI's ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, DALL-E, MidJourney, Jasper, and Stable Diffusion, which are large language models and image generators.

Since the creation of GPT-3 by San Francisco based, OpenAI, AI supports writers and story generators to enable content creation tasks far more productive. These story generating tools can produce natural text in different languages, and their outputs can set tones, styles and be grammatically error free. Just think of how the field of journalism will evolve with automated drafts, editing and even producing videos from text to expand content footprints. Synthesisa is also an interesting AI video generating tool working on GPT-3 capabilities. Other AI tools noteworthy are Writer.com and Jasper.AI, both popular writing tools for blogs, social media and websites.

Some of the positive aspects of Generative AI is that in healthcare, over 50% of drug development by 2025 will be using generative AI techniques to support early disease detection and support the development of new treatments. In marketing improving personalization of campaigns and increasing click through rates using generative AI will be used in over 30% of marketing organizations by 2025, hmmm what will the future hold for writers and marketing communication specialists?

Generative AI will also increasingly impact the media industry and be able to recreate any existing place in the world, generating 3D scenes from still photographs. Businesses benefit from generative AI models because they can learn from themselves and generate fresh data, which is cost-effective and efficient. New use cases shall emerge over the next few years as more firms experiment with Generative AI technology.

Hope 2 - Conversational AI

Natural Language, conversational AI methods, use machine learning to define the relationship among text. Using large statistical models, language modeling can help computers understand human text and create appropriate dialogue. Chatbot products like Siri, and Alexa are very popular voice assistants. It is common to find many industries also using conversational AI, with the main application being chatbots. That includes the financial, travel, marketing, and healthcare sectors. Now with OpenAI’s development with Chat-GP3 new breakthroughs are even more possible. Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic's "Breakthroughs of the Year" for 2022, that ChatGPT as part of "the generative-AI eruption" that "may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity really is". ChatGPT technology is built upon OpenAI’s GPT3 AI platform which houses some of the world’s largest language models, using both supervised and unsupervised AI learning techniques. Unlike most previous chatbots, ChatGPT remembers all previous conversations and queries are accurately filtered so racism or inappropriate prompts are immediately identified and dismissed. An interesting list of ideas supporting the value of ChatGPT was put together by technology writer, David Lumb, ranging from helping you prepare meals, losing weight or improving your bill payment methods. From an enterprise perspective, call centers will benefit from ChatGPT, to marketing professionals that want to innovate on customer interactions or even developing coaching support systems for employees, etc.

Hope 3 - No-Code AI

Developing software code from scratch is very time-consuming and requires expertise to build scaleable enterprise grade software. No-code AI platforms are growing in popularity as they allow businesses or individuals that are not specialized software programmers to build automated solutions, with limited technical knowledge, opening up opportunities to develop lower cost applications, improved software testing or debugging, and faster time to market. No-code solutions offer either a simple drag-and-drop interface to choose the components that you want to use in your application, or using a smart wizard where you are asked a series of questions and select options to build your application. There are many vendors in the no-code or often called low-code AI segment, ranging from: Akkio, Amazon’s - SageMaker,, DataRobot, Google, Microsoft - Lobe, Nanonets, ServiceNow, etc.

Hope 4 : Cybersecurity AI

In a 2022 Gartner Board of Directors Survey, 88% of board members classified cybersecurity as a business risk; just 12% called it a technology risk. Still, a 2021 survey showed that the CIO, the chief information security officer (CISO) or their equivalent were held accountable for cybersecurity at 85% of organizations. Cybersecurity attacks on organizations in critical infrastructure sectors rose from less than 10 in 2013 to almost 400 in 2020, a 3,900% increase (Gartner, 2022).

The global cybersecurity market was valued at USD $202.72 billion in 2022 and is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.3% from 2023 to 2030. The increase in attacks is due to the proliferation of smart devices, cloud computing, and eCommerce sites are major factors impacting the market’s growth. The USA already reports that over 90% of healthcare organizations have had one or more cyber security attacks. The Deep Instinct report also says that malware and ransomware usage have increased by 358% and 435%. Leading cybersecurity vendors include: Cisco, DarkTrace, PaloAlto Networks, Fortinet, IBM, Microsoft, Okta, etc. A more comprehensive list of Cybersecurity vendors is here. Gartner Group also always tracks carefully the leaders in cybersecurity, so following their research is always worthwhile.

Horrors

Horror 1 - Identity Theft

Increasing security risks of identity theft, fraud or counterfeiting increases due to innovations in Generative AI as they enable very realistic photos and images so just think of the escalating risks of identify theft. Deepfakes, an emergent type of threat falling under the greater and more pervasive umbrella of synthetic media, utilize a form of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to create believable, realistic videos, pictures, audio, and text of events which never happened. USA HomeLand Security published a good report on the threat of deepfakes and synthetic media and the risks they pose to spreading misinformation. Deepfakes although not new as research shows that since 2019 states like Russia and China have conducted influence operations leveraging GAN-generated images on their social media profiles, this is a popular way to impact campaign. Generative AI OpenAI programmers have already demonstrated that they can generate music from well-known artists, living and dead, and create realistic new songs by Elvis, Frank Sinatra etc. In 2020, a UK-based energy firm was hoaxed into sending roughly 200,000 British pounds to a Hungarian bank account after a malicious individual used deepfake audio technology to impersonate the firm's CEO's voice to authorize payments. The spread of Covid-19 has only made identify theft even worse, as the USA Federal Trade Commission has estimated over $400M due to to Covid-19 scams. Needless to say, we increasingly face a world where our identities can be hacked, and faked impacting our privacy, security and safety. As a parent, just think of the risks of having your child exposed to a stolen identify and risks we face when no longer can your voice, or face be true, finding new secret codes will be key to protect our children from the increasing risks of deepfake identify theft.

Horror 2 - Data Privacy

The most significant horror we are facing is the increasing risk of our personal data privacy. Gartner recently reported that 40% of organizations have had an AI privacy breach and that, of those breaches, only one in four was malicious. Areas where AI privacy is a major concern is on tracking employee behavior, assessing consumer sentiment and building “smart” products that learn on the go from our data footprints. No one better than Dr. Shoshana Zuboff has raised our awareness of the data privacy risks we face in her book, Surveillance Capitalism. One company blacklisted by Washington and that is not allowed to do business in the USA is SenseTime, a Chinese company which is akin to being in the movie Minority Report where all your personal information, purchasing transactions, walking, driving, travelling patterns are amassed into a central database and predictions on consumption, behavioural patterns can be made - reminiscent of George Orwell’s book, 1984 - you bet.

Some of AI's major privacy concerns are: data persistence (data that lasts longer than the people who developed it, thanks to low data storage costs), data repurposing (use of data for purposes other than those for which it was originally intended), and data spillovers (obtaining data of people who are not the intended audience). We will need stronger AI Ethics and Laws, to mitigate these increasing privacy risks. Fortunately, they are finally coming to center stage, as I wrote in this recent article.

Horror 3 - Mass Production of Humans Using Artificial Wombs

I wrote about the decreasing human population and artificial wombs and Meet Ectolife, the world’s first artificial womb facility, EctoLife, will be able to grow 30,000 babies a year. It's based on over 50 years of groundbreaking scientific research conducted by researchers worldwide. You can watch the ground breaking YouTube video here. Although we are faced with population decline challenges, is creating baby manufacturing plants the right strategy for creating a better world? Major ethical discussions are underway on this controversial development. Reminded me of the movie, The Island, a 2005 American dystopian science fiction action thriller film where the character Lincoln Six Echo struggles to fit into the highly structured world and eventually learns the compound inhabitants are clones used for organ harvesting as well as surrogates for wealthy people in the outside world and attempts to escape.

Conclusion

As in all innovations, there are always good actors and bad actors, hopes and fears or horrors as we evolve and strive to modernize our world. To improve our balance, passing legal laws for increased audit and controls on AI innovations will be critical and increasing data privacy controls. 2023 will be the year where balance will start to be restored and this brings great promise and hope to the Future of AI. I have often said, AI is not the new fuel for our planet, rather it will be the new oxygen as it will, in time, breathe new life into every business process, societal fabric and human tissue as man and machine will one day achieve singularity, enabled from major advancements in Generative AI.

Human curiosity is a natural force of evolutionary discovery - what we must ensure is that human civilization harnesses AI’s goodness and controls its’ risks.

I am very optimistic we will get AI right - just like we had to put in controls for our global transportation of airplanes flying safely - we will also advance AI to soar safely foreward.

Thinking of the worst case is far too doom and gloom as tomorrow is New Year’s eve and being Irish, I believe in good fortune.

Go n-eirí an t-ádh leat is one way of wishing all my readers ‘good luck’ which means, ‘That luck may rise with you!’