AI is impacting almost everyone nowadays, from employees to college students, and its role in the world is just going to grow from here. Despite AI being a new frontier of content creation and exciting technological developments, it can also be intimidating to understand what it can do, what it shouldn’t do, and if it is going to take over the world. (Don’t worry about that yet!)
To get clarity on the future of AI, Her Campus sat down with senior Microsoft researcher Ava Amini, who specializes in developing new AI methods and models to solve pre-existing problems in medicine and biology.
In Her Campus’ most recent survey about AI, 30% of Gen Z respondents said that they fear AI’s influence in the workplace “at least somewhat,” with an additional 10% saying they fear it a great deal. But Amini wants you to “think of AI as a way that we can program computers to help us do tasks that are similar to what humans think or do.”
It’s less about AI taking over, and instead about AI being a tool people can use in many different aspects of their lives. (And for those who worry about creative jobs being replaced by AI, Amini says, “I wouldn’t see it as a black and white replacement, but rather [that] it can guide us and help unleash even greater creativity if those tasks can be helped or supplemented by AI.”)
Amini encourages college students to expose themselves to AI, and experiment with tools available to them in their own interests. “Everything from sports to dance, music, science,” Amini says, “AI can be a tool, something that can help you and guide you along in that.”
Beyond hobbies and personal interests, Amini hopes people can see how AI can be utilized in the future to help with larger-scale projects. “There are so many applications for AI in terms of how it can help us really tackle these big, grand challenges that we face today from climate crisis and sustainability to problems in health and medicine to issues of equity and social justice,” she says.
Sounds promising, right? Her Campus asked Amini to tackle some common AI myths and set the record straight on what to know about AI’s future. Here’s what she had to say.
Myth or Fact: AI does a perfect job with every prompt it’s given.
This is absolutely a myth. It’s not the case that AI will give you a perfect or correct response every single time. AI is an amazing technology, but it’s far from perfect. … It’s on us as smart users of the technology to be able to see through the static and use our own judgment in terms of what we use and what we take versus what we say.
Myth or Fact: AI will change people’s jobs.
This is 100% a fact. I think it’s already happening. AI is going to change the landscape of our world, and part of that is jobs and how we work. Yes, there will be some roles and jobs that may be replaced by AI, but what I think is even more exciting and striking is that there are going to be brand-new roles and brand-new jobs that are going to be created as a result of AI.
Myth or Fact: AI can think.
I wouldn’t say it’s either a myth or a fact. One myth I want to debunk is that AI is meant to mimic the human brain. I think it’s better to think of AI as a tool, but ultimately with any tool, we as humans can still stay in control. Disentangling the idea of AI working like a brain versus AI being a tool, a computer tool that we can use, is an important thing to keep in mind.
Myth or Fact: AI is biased.
It’s more nuanced than just the myth or fact because AI itself, before it sees any data like the skeleton of the model, is not inherently biased. But it can inherit or pick up bias based on the data that we [use to] train the AI model. It has to see examples from our world, and because of that — if there are biases in that data that the AI sees — the AI itself can also perpetuate some of those biases because it’s ultimately built on data from us as humans.
Myth or Fact: We’re at a point where we can’t decipher AI content from real content.
It’s a myth. We’re not yet there where we cannot completely decipher what’s real versus what’s generated from AI. In fact, I think a lot of us may even be starting to notice what you can think of as red flags.
The example I really like is in AI-generated images. If you look, sometimes these models really struggle with making people’s hands. … Often when they try to generate printed texts, they’re not very good at this either. There are some really core red flags.
Myth or Fact: AI will impact politics this election year.
I think this is absolutely a fact. AI is going to be in the background with predictive models, projections about results, and forecasts. There’s a lot of technologies, not just AI, but how information spreads on social media and the algorithms that drive that. And again, it comes back to being smart users of this technology, but absolutely, we should be mindful of this and be aware of it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.