Artificial intelligence (AI) is making headlines, and the reviews are mixed.
Though the United States leads the world in AI investment, Americans remain skeptical. According to a global survey (pdf) by Ipsos, “Only 35 percent of sampled Americans agreed that products and services using AI had more benefits than drawbacks.” Among surveyed countries, America had one of the lowest percentages of those who agreed with the statement.
Private industry has edged out academia in producing state-of-the-art AI systems; at the same time, the number of incidents of ethical misuse of AI has increased dramatically—from 10 in 2012 to over 250 in 2021.
The field is growing in what could be called a “Wild West” of AI. According to Stanford University’s AI Index Report, “AI has moved into its era of deployment; throughout 2022 and the beginning of 2023, new large-scale AI models have been released every month.” These models include Stable Diffusion, Whisper, DALL-E 2, and the ubiquitous ChatGPT. The area with the most investment? Health care….