Artificial intelligence is evolving faster than ever. After ChatGPT made headlines for its unique human-like conversational and content creation skills, the popularity of generative AI tools went off the grid. Data forecasts suggest that 10% of all the content by 2025, will be produced by generative AI.
Applications like Google Bard, Dall-E and Copy.ai are transforming how content is created and consumed. They use advanced algorithms and deep machine learning models to generate new text, images, music, etc. by analyzing and learning from pre-existing information.
While AI-assisted writing can be time-saving, economical and SEO-optimized, it has significant scope for errors. This article discusses a few notable ethical concerns that challenge the practical usefulness of automated content.
Ethical Issues Related To AI Content
1) Copyright Infringement And Legal Issues
Machine-generated content is prone to copyright violation. The data used to train these models is fundamentally created by humans, be it blogs, articles, imagery, etc., which might be protected. AI uses this exclusive material to produce outputs.
It puts the user, developers and even the owners of the AI platform at risk of infringement. More so, if the references aren’t cited, and the content is used to sell the work that originally belonged to others, or threatens to compete with the original creators in any way, may further lead to legal implications.
2) Possibility Of Bias In The Content
AI creates content on the basis of instructions entered by humans. If these input instructions are influenced by personal bias, the resulting output will also be. Or the platform can reflect a bias unintentionally owing to compromised training information.
For example: When asked for the image of a pilot, the AI might return the image of a man in uniform arbitrarily, if it is made to learn that male candidates are preferred as pilots over female candidates through the training dataset.
3) Quality Concerns
AI-forged content lacks depth, authenticity and creativity which makes it insensitive, mediocre and monotonous, eventually discredited by the end users.
Plus, the chances of accidental plagiarism in output are real.
Moreover, AI content tends to get devalued by search engines like Google that prefer quality over everything and strive to provide their human users with relevant and reliable information. Poor-quality AI content can hit your SEO efforts.
Quality concerns are the reasons why human inputs are irreplaceable. If you are also concerned about the authenticity of your content, AI detection tools like Originality.AI can prove to be useful.
4) Security Concerns
Artificial Intelligence software can access your personal and sensitive business information via bots and cookies. This information can be manhandled by developers and hackers and poses cybersecurity challenges.
For instance, if someone uses an AI platform to generate code for developing another AI software, without taking user information management and privacy into account, it could lead to serious consequences such as data leaks, manipulation and fraud.
Plus, if the app in itself is not secure enough, its installation can endanger the entire system risking overall network security.
5) Misinformation And Harmful Content
An AI generative tool runs on machine learning technology. What you feed is what you get. Since the elementary dataset for AI tools can include deliberately altered misinformation, it will display the same and that too in a seemingly convincing fashion.
For example, it can be used to spread harmful ideologies, discriminating opinions, fake news, propaganda, etc.
6) Endangering Livelihoods
The more the world gets automated, the less workforce it requires. The world has been talking about how AI will eventually widely replace humans across industries.
The current scenario can be highlighted by the following statistics:
- More than 74% of employers consider AI-generated content useful.
- AI is responsible for more than 50% of lost jobs in the marketing field.
- Software and IT companies plan to cut about 26% of their workforce on account of ChatGPT.
Conclusion
Above mentioned risks need to be addressed in a systematic manner by introspecting all the arenas of AI content i.e. development, usage, and regulation.
By equipping AI with quality information in large quantities, improvising the existing dataset, and upgrading the algorithm to mitigate if not completely counter the technology’s ethical vulnerabilities, AI-powered content can be made all the more worthwhile!
