So, future me, what does AI do to us and our surroundings?
Great question pre-me! Now I’m sure us as students have heard the same speech repeatedly by teachers. “Don’t use ai because we want your work and it’s cheating.” Well I’m here to talk to you about how it affects us beyond saying just don’t. Now AI can be a very helpful supportive tool if used correctly, but it has a multitude of drawbacks and effects.
How does it affect us as students?
Well I know we’ve all been told ‘ai will rot your brain’ without a thorough explanation why. Statistically ai has been shown to hold potential bias from incomplete data. Which means that it will alter, dilute, or even just lie about information in order to prove a point it was trained to believe.
Shown by one of my references at Virgina Tech Engineer. “AI is a powerful tool that can easily be misused. In general, AI and learning algorithms extrapolate from the data they are given. If the designers do not provide representative data, the resulting AI systems become biased and unfair.”
Now this would seem like a rare problem, but us as humans are always going to be opinionated or leaning to one side or another, even if the information isn’t true. Which makes this inaccuracy issue extremely common. Asking AI for opinions about something is like looking at a random article from a random website. It won’t always be right, it won’t always be wrong, but it will almost always be opinionated.
What about the whole dependence problem?
Well, me from the past. While this problem isn’t nearly as common it’s still a widescale issue upon our society. AI is starting to influence our decision making. But not for the reason you might think, believe it or not AI is not just on our ChatGPT assistant or Google Gemini, it’s also in our algorithms. From social media to purchasing platforms like Amazon in order to get us to see things in a certain way.
According to Virginia Tech Engineer. “…the types of shows you see are influenced by the shows recommended to you by an artificial agent. More generally, today’s AI systems influence human decision making at multiple levels: from viewing habits to purchasing decisions, from political opinions to social values.”
Now without getting political AI is showing us things online with the goal of making us see things a certain way. Whether that be about silly shows, products we purchase or don’t, to things as big as world events! So now we move onto how it effects the environment.
Wait… The Environment?
Yeah pre-me! Fun fact! Generative AI has consequences on our environment too! There’s the least hidden consequence; training AI uses up a LOT of electricity, which leads to an increased amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere along with more pressure on our electric grids. But even after it’s trained (due to the consistent use of AI both from companies and the individuals) It still uses a buttload of electricity along with water! Yeah you read that right, water. I know what you’re thinking… Why water? Well computer systems need a coolant, and with these massive servers generative AI like ChatGPT is working on requires a TON of it.
According to MIT News. “Beyond electricity demands, a great deal of water is needed to cool the hardware used for training, deploying, and fine-tuning generative AI models, which can strain municipal water supplies and disrupt local ecosystems.”
Are We Done Yet?
Just about pre-me, We got to go over the summary for the people who skipped straight to the end here. So what have we learned today? We learned that AI while cool as a tool, isn’t really all that reliable as the companies running the AI promise to be along with the massive impact it’s currently having on the environment. So I hope we all walk away today just a little bit more educated and cautious about AI.
