Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all the buzz, companies developing AI would have you believe that we can no longer live without AI to live day to day lives. Promising better communications, improved productivity and an overall happier life. OK, so maybe the last one is stretching it a little.
While I try to avoid giving personal information to AI as much as possible, this is getting increasingly harder to do when apps are requesting access information in the guise of giving you ‘better service’.
Increasingly AI is being used to flood the internet with what has been coined AI Slop. From deep fakes through to images of people with a spare hand attached somewhere it shouldn’t through to AI generated videos filling YouTube with even more noise making it harder to find original human made content.
The drive for ethical use of AI is a message more and more people are pushing for.
The ethical use of AI comes in many forms, from how data is used, the data being passed into AI for training use and the output from AI and how that is being used and portrayed.
This got me thinking, in today’s AI environment where nearly every application or large organisation is embedding AI into apps and services we use every day, how is it that we can be sure our personal data is being used ethically, even if we ourselves do not use those AI tools.
Microsoft CoPilot springs to mind, but this is not limited to just Microsoft. It just so happens that when a computer I have with Windows got CoPilot during a Microsoft Windows Feature Update, it asked if I wanted CoPilot to have access to search and write to files, not just on my local hard drive, but the network drives connected to my computer. While I opted not to allow this and even uninstalled the CoPilot app from that computer, I began to wonder how many people (family or friends) who may have information of about me in their files / contact lists that have allowed AI to access that information without my knowledge.
How much does AI really know about me based upon information gathered from sources I personally didn’t allow? Should we be concerned about that information? What are these corporate organisations really doing with that data?
I’ve always agreed with the argument, if you don’t want it online, don’t post it. But what about if that is being collected from a third party who unknowingly just gave information about you that you may or may not have known existed in the first place.
Most companies offering AI services have Terms of Service and Privacy Policies that are designed to allow those companies to use data in training, which the original user may agree to but does that retrospectively apply to the data of other people obtained from that users computer.
Next time you agree to those terms of service, just stop and think about how your use of those services impacts the data of people who may not have agreed to have their data shared in this manner.
