With need of being tech savvy, Artificial Intelligence has its own share of ethical risks to tackle

New Delhi, September 3: With the growing digital age, the need for being digitally and technologically advanced has become the need of the hour. Being tech-savvy, the need for artificial intelligence has shown its presence like never before! With pitching Artificial Intelligence as the next big thing, Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to increase the efficacy of existing discriminatory measures. This pumps up the possibility of ethical risks pertaining to AI.

These discriminatory measures include racial profiling, behavioral prediction, and even the identification of someone’s sexual orientation. AI helps to improve the preventive use of video surveillance systems in public places. Images are now being continuously analyzed by software that detects acts of aggression and can quickly raise the alarm.

 

It has been noted that the facial recognition errors are very common. All it takes is one small glitch in the image for the AI to see a toaster instead of a face. The feeling of excessive investigation and the multiplication of errors can be particularly worrying.

Facial recognition is used in several countries, to identify “terrorist behavior” or “criminal character”, using facial recognition. Their facial features would, therefore, be used to indicate their intrinsic criminal tendencies.

Alarmed by the revival of the face through this face recognition, Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang of Stanford University wanted to study and expose the dangers of this pseudo-scientific theory. To alarm everyone on the risks of invasion of privacy, they created an “AI gaydar” in 2017 which is basically a programme to identify whether someone is homosexual or not, only by analyzing their photograph. According to the authors, the margin of error for the programme is only 20%. In addition to its slurring effect, the application of this technology would violate the right of everyone not to disclose their sexual orientation.

Taking into consideration all these examples, there is an urgent need to establish an ethical framework for AI research.