Is AI going to take away jobs? An expert weighs in on these concerns

From Alexa to Siri to ChatGPT, artificial intelligence is becoming more and more prevalent in our everyday lives.

In the last few months, issues of AI in the classroom, courtroom and even at the Grammy Awards have come to the forefront.

Though it seems like it is a new development, the technology has been around for a while.

“We’ve used it in things like bank fraud detection. Whenever you use a credit card, there’s an AI that’s deciding whether that’s a legitimate transaction or not,” said David Gerhard, University of Manitoba professor and department head of computer science.

“It’s in the stock market. It’s in our day-to-day lives in our phones and things. It’s all over the place.”

With the increase in recent discussions about AI, many people have become nervous that it will harm society and take away jobs.

Gerhard doesn’t think AI will take all the jobs, but said that it will upset the job market as it’s a strong tool for content-based work.

“It’s not like you’re going to lose your job to AI, but you may lose your job to a person that’s able to use AI better than you can,” he said.

As for the issue of students using AI to write college essays, Gerhard said schools will need to re-examine the way they evaluate students.

HOW INTELLIGENT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI, which is when machines perform function we often associate with human minds, is trained on data from the internet. This means it’s been trained on what humans say and do. However, not all of this is correct information, and AI doesn’t know the difference.

“If you ask it for something, it will give you its best guess, but it’s not going to say, ‘I don’t know,’” Gerhard said.

“If you ask it for something, it doesn’t know it will make something up. This is one of the big problems with these new models.”

Gerhard added that companies are trying to create boundaries around AI, so that it doesn’t behave in certain ways or tell people to do bad things. The problem is it’s not difficult to get around these boundaries.

“If you want to get this information from the AI, it’s in there. You just have to ask it the right way,” he said.

- With files from CTV’s Rachel Lagace.