CSC 320 A.I. Blog

In today’s world, artificial intelligence continues to expand in its real world application.  As the use of this technology grows, however, it raises questions and concerns about the ethical situations that artificial intelligence may start addressing.  In the last couple of weeks, the concept of technology analyzing these ethical situations has been suggested as a possibility .  In this case, artificial intelligence could possibly be able to identify unethical behavior by extracting evidence of immoral actions in the business setting.  Although research does not suggest that the technology could do this on its own at this time, it is still showing how artificial intelligence could utilize a set of morals to determine if something is ethical or not. Going beyond just a business setting, is it possible for artificial intelligence to have a set of morals to make ethical decisions?  To understand this, it may be important to define what a moral is. A moral is ...

Facial Recognition: What is too far? ( image source ) Artificial intelligence covers a wide variety of topics. One major issue that is coming up across the world is facial recognition. The Quartz newspaper described the European Union's (EU) recent meeting in which they discussed their agenda to regulate the technology sector of the EU's nations ( article ). The document titled "White Paper on Artificial Intelligence" barely mentioned Facial Recognition which would allow the countries to have unregulated permissions to set up facial recognition technology however they want. They literally can put up security cameras in an Orwellian fashion throughout the streets.  The Washington Post published an article furthering this debate by explaining why various tech companies want to have regulations on facial recognition software. US and China are the prominent countries making facial recognition software. Major companies around the world have said that they wa...

As artificial intelligence continues to advance alongside our other technological capabilities, some dangers have come to light. With all the discussion surrounding the current presidency and its relationship with the media and "fake news", AI and its ability to produce what are known as "Deep Fakes" have been cause for concern. According to the Wikipedia page on deep fakes, they are described as "synthetic media in which a person in an existing image, video, or audio is replaced with someone else's likeness." Using deep learning, these programs study photographs and videos of an individual in order to learn their typical facial movements and speech patterns in order to produce an artificial version of them. Of course, with many of these new advancements, they start with good intentions. Deep fakes can be used for lighthearted fun like seeing a celebrity sing a funny song, or seeing what it might be like for one of your favorite actors play part...

In a recent article in The Detroit News, the question of whether AI should be issued patents is raised. AI has been credited with creating some innovations, but it is currently not allowed to receive legal patents recognizing them as inventors. The issue of whether the inventor is the AI or the humans who made the AI comes into play when humans are far enough removed from the AI’s inventive process that it starts to seem like a gray area. Should the credit go to the robot or the human who developed its algorithms? (Photo credit:  http://www.ipcg.com/?file=How_Will_AI_Invent ) The US and Europe only give patents to humans for the time being, but it doesn’t seem like it’s a closed issue yet since there will inevitably be more inventions by AI in the future. Last year an AI called DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) invented a beverage container and a device to attract attention used in search and rescue missions. The team behind DABUS fil...

Welcome to our class A.I. blog! Here you will find non-artificially intelligent commentary about recent developments in artificial intelligence, by the students from  CSC 320: Principles of Artificial Intelligence , from Spring Semester 2019-20 at Augustana College.