Hello, tech editor Alexei Oreskovic here. We're learning more about AI's shortcomings and limitations as the technology becomes ingrained in our everyday lives. Just ask former Trump consigliere Michael Cohen, whose lawyers relied on generative AI to submit legal filings that were filled with citations of nonexistent cases that were "hallucinated" by the AI.
But one of AI's biggest flaws has less to do with the technology than it does with ourselves. The biases that cause AI systems to make false assumptions about certain groups of people or to misidentify people of color in facial recognition is essentially a reflection of the biases prevalent in society. An AI model is only as good as the data it's fed, and the data that's produced by our society is far from perfect.
Similarly, the way we use AI technology is also subject to some of our worst traits. That's one of the lessons in an eye-opening report this morning by Fortune's Ben Weiss and Alexandra Sternlicht, looking at the proliferation of AI-powered sex chatbots. As Weiss and Sternlicht reported, many of these chatbots are based on Llama 2, the open-source AI large language model created by Meta.
While sex chatbots may not seem like a problem to many people (after all, who's to say what's right or wrong between consenting adults—or, in this case, a consenting adult and a bot), it turns out that many of these bots are being used to create text-based simulations of sexual exploitation of minors. Because the AI model powering the bots is open source, there's nothing that Meta, the creator of the Llama 2 model, can do to stop it. The whole point of open-source software is that anyone can do with it what they please.
When open-source software was used for things like PC operating systems, this lack of control wasn't much of a problem. With AI, things become a bit more complicated.
Expect many more of these uncomfortable situations with AI to crop up in the coming months and years. What will make many of these cases so challenging is that they involve fundamental problems about ourselves that we have yet to solve.
With that, here are more of today's top tech stories.
Alexei Oreskovic
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Today’s edition was curated by Rachyl Jones.
