It has become difficult to avoid artificial intelligence in our every day lives, not least through AI-produced content on social media that is making it ever harder to distinguish between what is real and what is artificially-generated.
But AI has a wider scope and place than just making cheap political content for fake profiles to plaster across Facebook.
The Malta Independent on Sunday recently spoke to Professor Alexiei Dingli, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Malta's Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, to discuss the challenges and opportunities that come with the recent proliferation of AI.
The interview came after TVM aired its first show hosted by an AI presenter, in a series called Artificial Intelligence in our lives, with an avatar modelled after Dingli.
"Many people don't know what AI really is or means," Dingli said when asked about the scope of the show. There are many preconceptions originating from Hollywood, with there being a plethora of fictional examples of robots trying to take over the world. "That is not going to happen, in the immediate future at least," the AI professor commented.
Indeed, the programme has looked into various facets of how AI can be used, covering topics such as health, transportation, cybersecurity, education, industry, labour, and personal relationships.
It is true that AI can be harnessed for plenty of good. For instance, the government is already using an AI-based system to clamp down on tax evasion and has been using AI technology within the health sector as well. A recent idea by the Nationalist Party to use artificial intelligence to help manage traffic flows also carries a strong amount of good sense.
But there are also severe risks and dangers involved with AI.
For instance, Dingli was asked if it is feasible for AI-generated videos to become basically indistinguishable from reality in some short time, and whether he believes that poses any potential risks.
He replied that yes, it is feasible, and that he believes it poses a lot of risks, adding that it is part of his biggest concern. "What if it's a court case against you, and I get a video of you doing something?" He believes the system needs to be rethought, and spoke about the importance of having systems to detect and flag AI videos.
The academic said that a detection system is not an infallible one, and that it can and will fail, but added that this is why people need to think critically as well in addition to AI tools that can help with flagging.
The problem with this is that one cannot rely on the majority of people to think critically, unfortunately. The education system is not adept in equipping our population with this capacity as of now, and older generations - for whom this technology was probably beyond the wildest of their imaginations - will struggle particularly with identifying what is AI-generated, and what isn't.
Another key issue with AI is in how and where it gets its data from. Major AI systems scrape data - even personal data - off the web; and people may not know that their data is being used to power these AI systems.
Dingli said that AI is a very important tool, and, referring to a quote by Stephen Hawking, said that AI is "probably the most powerful tool ever invented by humans, but it depends on how we are going to use it". Dingli likened AI to atomic energy, which he commented can also be used to create atomic bombs. "So let's be very careful, because it can be very dangerous as well."
The question is whether humans can harness this new technology for something positive. Social media was also seen as an unprecedented positive when it became mainstream. Today, humans have turned it into the root cause of many of society's problems.
One hopes that AI does not follow the same route.