Learn about the latest AI tools available in business, like AI video generators, audio, video game creation, and autonomous vehicles, a brief summary of how AI works, the legal ramifications of AI, and what jobs could be up in the air by 2030, 2040, and even 2050.
What do these three things have in common? A game of Pacman, recreated from scratch, Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs in 2022, and the prediction of melanoma and cardiac dysfunction risk in patients? If you guessed artificial intelligence, you are correct!
In this report, we share the latest AI tools available in business, like AI video generators, audio and video game creation, predictive models, and autonomous vehicles; a brief summary of how AI works; the legal ramifications of AI; and what jobs could be up in the air by 2030, 2040, and even 2050.
Get inspired and terrified: here's a taste of what AI can do going into 2023:
And that's not even 1% of what's currently available or on the horizon!
It's been predicted by MIT that the next breakthrough in AI will come from multimodal AI models that can use computer vision and audio together to interpret information. Large language models built into AI as they sense the world could help robots understand their surroundings through visual and vocal cues. Combined with reinforcement learning, AI will soon explore with autonomy and interact with their environment to learn even more.
How AI works is beyond the scope of this video, but here's a high-level crash course. To count as AI, a system needs to make its own decisions, and make its own predictions. Developers use machine learning to generate "artificial" intelligence, or thousands and thousands of decision-making units that are interconnected in a lattice that all work together to learn patterns. These lattices form a neural network, an information processing machine meant to simulate a brain, with interconnected networks of neurons that make different decisions and predictions based on different inputs.
The AI's artificial neurons take in inputs and create an output of either 0 or 1, with unique weights and biases that can be toggled up or down depending on what's being trained. These numbers, stored in each artificial neuron, form the memory of the AI brain. All this computation and learning requires a ton of input (as in datasets of hundreds of millions to even billions of inputs) so that the AI can learn.
The way the AI teaches itself how to weight each input is called backpropagation. Developers give the AI training examples or inputs where the desired output is known. It creates predictions from this, and an error score is assigned to each output. The machine then rebalances itself backwards over time to learn the optimal weights to minimize errors and make more and more accurate predictions. And that's generally how AI works.
So who owns the copyright behind AI? AI has been on the US copyright office's mind since 1965 when someone tried to copyright a musical composition made by a computer. The US copyright office ruled at least twice that AI art can't be copyrighted unless there is a directly responsible human collaborator. The UK, EU, and Australian intellectual property offices have ruled the same. There's actually a four-step test to determine if AI can gain copyright in the EU:
The third step there is the most important: if a work does not reflect the free and creative choices of the author, that work is considered in the public domain, copyright speaking. Until determined otherwise in the court, humans who use AI as a tool should be protected by copyright as the owner. But AI tools where a human enters a text prompt to create an image, don't currently qualify as an original work of authorship and therefore can't be copyrighted.
So what if an AI recreates an image of you? As of 2020, anyone can make realistic deepfakes without the use of complicated software. And AI already exists that can copy the voice of anyone with voice imitation algorithms. This could lead to an increase in identity theft and fraud. In 2020, a bank manager in Hong Kong fell victim to a voice-deepfake that cloned the voice of a director at another company to authorize $35 million dollars in bank transfers. This was the second known case of AI voice cloning to carry out a heist, but the first successful one.
And then there's the legal gray area of the rights over to your voice and body. The British actor Rick Kiesewetter signed away all of his rights to recordings of his voice and facial movements as part of a job for a tech company. Could this company one day legally recreate its own AI version of Rick and profit off of it without paying him?
And then there's not safe for work applications, such as deepfake sexual content, which can be used to create images without the subject's consent. In 2019, the research company Sensitivity AI found that 96% of deepfake videos online were non-consensual adult content. The open-source image generator StabilityAI has already been used to recreate Not safe for work content of celebrities. So if an actor like Rick signed away the rights to his voice and movements, could it one day be used to legally recreate adult content of him without his knowledge or consent? Parallel movements in the US and UK are gaining momentum to ban nonsensual deepfakes. For all these issues, a wave of litigation is on the horizon to hopefully provide us answers over the next ten to fifteen years… when there's enough money on the line, at least.
A 2022 survey of 2,000 workers found 14% reported losing their jobs to a robot. The futurist Thomas Frey estimated 50% of today's jobs will no longer exist by 2030. By 2024, AI is predicted to be better at translating languages than humans. By 2026, they could write better high school essays. By 2027, they'll be better at driving trucks. By 2031, they'll work in retail. By 2049, they'll write a bestselling book. And by 2053, they'll perform surgery. Its also been predicted that all human jobs could be automated over the next 120 years.
Here's a brief summary of the industries (and roles) that will be impacted:
The scale that AI provides is the issue, as it encourages the centralization of wealth. The few major companies with the best algorithms will likely own the market, creating a winner takes all environment. For example, the safest autonomous taxi company will be the one everyone rides. The best image generator will become the one everyone uses instead of contract artists. Adobe Shutterstock will now license and sell images exclusively created on the Dall-E 2 image generator. While the plan is to compensate artists with royalties when their IP is used, individuals are banned from uploading their own AI-generated art to the platform. As these services get more advanced, their costs will rise, and artists will have to undercut their own rates in order to keep up.
There are only two solutions: regulation or greater investment in AI for more competition. You can't afford to be left behind, so if you aren't currently using AI as part of your business, it's time to get involved. When it comes to the future of AI in business, it is truly unlimited - at least for now. Thanks for reading.