6 Negative Effects of AI

New AI models like ChatGPT and Midjourney certainly have their charm. They’re quick and powerful tools that have already made many of us more productive. However, there are also some negative effects of AI that we should be aware of…

AI poses serious privacy and security risks, as AI tools are given access to sensitive data that may end up in the wrong hands. Some other concerns include biased decision-making, social inequality, a loss of jobs, and overreliance. Thus, we must remain vigilant and move slowly with AI.

Before we fully implement AI in our lives, we need to understand the consequences first. Let’s go over some downsides of AI so that you have a better understanding of the dangers of AI.

1. Privacy and Security Concerns

There are some serious concerns about using AI to gather and process private user data. And since lawmakers have traditionally been rather slow to catch on, there’s no guarantee that your data is safe.

Unfortunately, aside from writing a disclosure, companies aren’t held accountable for using AI to process data.

The consequences of this are unprecedented.

As AI becomes more sophisticated and gathers more user data, it could lead to dangerous data leaks and security concerns.

For instance, what if a company builds an AI tool that gets compromised, together with private data? And since AI technology is relatively new and we don’t fully grasp it, what if there’s a bug? Bing’s Sydney glitch is still in recent memory, for instance.

This could lead to identity and money theft, fraud, profiling, and even unauthorized access to restricted areas.

Moreover, most of our data would likely be collected and processed by AI owned by a handful of powerful companies. They can use AI to process your private data to manipulate or sell you something. I’ll talk more about social inequality later.

Note that privacy concerns are already a major ongoing issue in our modern society. AI is merely exacerbating it, as we don’t understand what big tech companies will do with our data.

Guy Pierce from ISACA warns that “Data collected by means of AI also raises privacy issues like informed consent freely given, being able to opt out, limiting data collection, describing the nature of AI processing, and even being able to delete data on request.”

It’s hard to consent to something we can’t fully understand or if we can’t even know what data is being processed by AI.

Awareness and demand for transparency could push companies into adopting ethical considerations and responsibilities. So, we should remain vigilant to ensure our data remains protected.

2. Biased Decision-Making and Unreliability

AI heavily relies on training data and patterns within it to make decisions. This leads to AI algorithms making incorrect assumptions.

For instance, if biases are present in the data, the AI’s algorithm can further exaggerate them.

This leads to discriminatory results in areas like hiring, delivering justice, and money loans.

For instance, back in 2018, Amazon tried using an AI tool to hire the best candidates.

However, they quickly realized that it was extremely discriminatory against women. This likely happened because engineers in the tech industry are predominantly male — AI merely perpetuated existing biases.

AI technology is still in its infancy. This reason alone makes AI tools extremely unreliable. So, it’s quite dangerous when large companies decide to go full steam ahead with AI, as it leads to unpredictable results.

It’s important to note that “dirty data” isn’t the only cause of bias in AI.

Algorithms used by AI to learn can lead to new biases. This can happen due to various factors, such as incorrectly adjusted parameters or poor architecture design.

Drug testing and discovery are examples of where biases can lead to dangerous inaccuracies. AI’s lack of morals and sufficient data can lead to inaccuracies in identifying side effects in certain demographic groups.

3. Overreliance

As AI technology becomes more advanced, we’re bound to start relying on it more and more.

The same thing happened with smartphones. 15 years ago, laptops and desktop computers were the primary devices for most people to access the internet.

And now it’s estimated that about 73% of all internet traffic will come exclusively from smartphones by 2025.

AI chatbots are becoming more powerful by the day. The general population has already started to use tools like ChatGPT in their daily workflow. Chances are, you’ve started using it yourself.

This isn’t necessarily bad, but it can have some unforeseen long-term consequences. Overreliance on AI will make us lazy, and we won’t work on our essential skills as hard. This can cause creativity to sink, resulting in generic, cookie-cutter content and media.

But the dangers don’t stop with the entertainment industry.

Another example is self-driving cars. Relying on autonomous driving means we won’t develop our essential driving skills as much. This lack of responsiveness in risky situations can lead to car crashes.

The lack of human judgment and oversight can also result in output data that is morally and ethically questionable.

AI’s confidence when giving predictions or straight-up inaccurate answers is another danger. If we rely on AI to predict when to do maintenance of a machine or safety mechanism without even inspecting it, it can lead to fatal failures.

It’s crucial to understand the potential negative effects of AI, such as social inequality and job loss. To gain better understanding of these issues and explore the areas where AI may fall short, you can find all of them in our article ‘Areas Where AI Will Fail‘.

4. Social Inequality

Again, AI’s total lack of morals and ethics is to blame for the potential social inequality it might cause.

One major concern is that even more control and power will be shifted into the hands of trillion-dollar tech companies.

This future is explored in depth in HBO Westworld in Season 3. This could lead to an Orwellian future in which an AI Big Brother would determine our important life decisions. The scary part is that it could become true soon if we’re not careful.

A real-world example of AI social inequality in action is in predictive policing with the help of AI. An AI learning from past crimes could theoretically determine potential criminals to stop them before they do anything. These AI models have proven to be racist, caused by the dirty data fed into them.

5. Job Loss

CBS News reports that AI has caused a loss of around 4,000 jobs in May alone.

We’re at the dawn of a new era of intelligent automation. Powerful AI models have made many workers obsolete, as companies can now do more work with fewer people.

It was previously believed that AI would replace boring and low-paying jobs. But, as it turns out, AI replaced workers in highly creative fields first, such as art and writing.

Remember, this is just the beginning. AI’s open-source nature incentivizes companies to create custom AI tools to speed up their workflow. This will lead to workers being laid off as the AI slowly replaces them.

6. Hacking and Social Engineering

With the help of transformer models like GPT, hackers can perform large-scale cyberattacks against both companies and individuals.

The main concern is that AI can learn to code from large datasets and achieve human-level performance.

Also, automatic and custom phishing emails are concerningly easy to do with the help of AI. Before AI, the main drawback scammers faced was that it was time-consuming to reply to hundreds of emails. With AI, they can trick people into handing over money or personal data that could be used as ransom.

Hackers and social engineers can use AI technology to:

Create undetectable malware
Find zero-day vulnerabilities
Create hard-to-detect backdoors
Create customized phishing emails
Collect personal data to create deepfakes to blackmail
Hack into the world’s most advanced security protocols

It’s concerning to see how powerful and customizable AI is. This might turn into an arms race between hackers and cybersecurity experts to see who can outsmart who.

Final Thoughts

AI can be used for good to genuinely help people thanks to its impressive human-like performance. However, there are some serious consequences that must be considered.

Lawmakers should handle concerns with AI before the technology has a chance to cause any major harm. Also, companies should be pushed into making ethical decisions with their implementation of AI software.