Is generative technology becoming a sight for sore AI?

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has been meteoric, bringing with it a host of benefits, challenges and perceived risks.

Authorities have been scrambling to regulate the sector as new innovations within AI continue to outpace existing guidelines.

“AI needs to be regulated – it’s too important not to,” Joyce Baz, a spokesperson for Google, one of generative AI’s main players, told media.

“It is important to build tools and guardrails to help prevent the misuse of technology. Generative AI makes it easier than ever to create new content, but it also raises additional questions about trustworthiness of information online.”

For starters, there seems to be a “huge dissonance” between what the general public cares about when discussing generative AI and what executives and business owners do, said Thomas Monteiro, a senior analyst at Investing.com.

The former always care more about the “bad” while the entrepreneurs only look at the “good”, he said.

“It is more than a purely technology-related matter. It is a broad social matter for which society still hasn’t found a common ground … and this is the main challenge for regulators at this point.”

Generative AI could add as much as $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy and will transform productivity across sectors with continued investment in the technology, McKinsey & Company said in a study earlier this year.

The downside, however, stems from AI’s “imperfections at its inception, potentially leading to instances of inaccuracies or hallucinations”, said Chiara Marcati, a partner at McKinsey & Company.

“This underscores the need for extensive awareness, continual mental filtering of AI outcomes and an emphasis on AI literacy,” she said.

AI hallucination is a phenomenon in which a large language model – often a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool – perceives patterns or objects that are non-existent or imperceptible to human observers, creating output that is nonsensical or altogether inaccurate, according to IBM.

In art and design, AI hallucination offers a “novel approach to artistic creation, providing artists, designers and other creatives a tool for generating visually stunning and imaginative imagery”, IBM says.