Artificial intelligence has certainly found its way into our society, and it’s been added to everything. Go onto almost any site and AI will somehow be integrated, whether needed or not. You’ll get ads made by AI, with AI integrated into the product – or it’s claimed to be.
Saying AI is in everything is not much of an exaggeration. Coca Cola used it for their ads, so did Toys R Us, Oral-B even integrated AI into one of their toothbrushes. Their “Genius X” toothbrush claims that it “recognizes your brushing style” and “guides you to brush better every day,” according to the website. Of course, like most AI products, it’s required to download an app to use it. It uses sensors to track what you’re brushing and shows you on your phone, which, arguably, doesn’t seem to need the use of AI to be possible. This seems to be true for a lot of AI products.
AI also plays a role in scams. Now that anyone can create a seemingly high-quality video with a free generative AI, or a subscription one for even better visuals, scams have evolved. Before, you’d be able to pick out the stock footage, but now, you have to look closely to assure the footage is real.
The good thing with scams is they usually all use the same website format, so once you’re there, you realize there’s nothing there for you to buy. The thing is, a lot of people aren’t familiar with these kinds of websites and will still fall prey to these scams.
One of these things you might be familiar with are the AI robot animals, which showed clips of real and AI generated animals claiming them to be an advanced AI robot toy. Sometimes, you’d buy it and nothing would show up at all, or you’d buy it and it would be a cheap plush that cost practically nothing.
While not a scam, AI can malfunction and tell you incorrect information. Google’s AI was famous for saying that you should “eat at least one small rock per day.” Google AI pulls from websites and summarizes the information, but this answer pulled from The Onion, which specifically posts satire or fake news. The info it pulls can have conflicting answers, or it’ll pull from a site like Reddit, where people might be joking or lying. These issues have now been, for the most part, fixed.
Since AI is such a broad term, products can claim they use AI and technically be right. Though, don’t expect an advanced chatbot AI, as a lot of brands use AI as a selling point despite the lack of the AI we’ve become familiar with.
Something AI is used for that you might not know as well is moderation. Sites like YouTube and Roblox both use AI to moderate their site instead of real people. There are large issues presented in using AI like this, even leading to a lawsuit towards YouTube for falsely banning a channel. Months prior, the channel had been verified by a human, but when they switched to AI, the channel was banned for the same reason the human had already said wasn’t an issue.
A lot of people may notice that AI seems to work as a tool to collect our data in a lot of cases. With YouTube’s AI, it’s now analyzing the videos you watch to determine your age, and the only way to stop it from marking you as a child and restricting you from certain videos is to give the app your ID. Roblox now has you scan your face to determine your age, too.
AI is a fairly new thing, and it just keeps getting more advanced, so it only makes sense everyone is trying to cash in now when it’s “trendy.” Look at old AI generated images compared to the ones we have now. With some pictures nowadays, it’s impossible to tell it’s AI generated at first glance.
Despite what many people think and hope, AI is not going to go away like other tech trends. It might die down, most definitely will, but it’ll always be here. This is fortunate to some, and unfortunate to others, but we’re going to have to learn to live with it. AI can be an amazing tool for good, doing things we never could and improving the world, but it can also be a tool for bad- scams, exploitation, and misinformation.
