Last week, we at DataBrut had the opportunity to participate in a “Digital Open Society (DOS) Technology and Social Disruption: Impact on Serbia and the Region” seminar organized by the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung on subjects related to recent AI advancements and using them to improve lives in various spheres of work. We have been following these advancements and researching potential uses in some domains of usage. However, by participating in this seminar workshop, we gained insights into how participants from different spheres perceive AI in general, recent advancements in the industry (e.g., ChatGPT), and potential challenges, outcomes, and solutions.

On these two days, lecturers tried to bring us closer to the technology behind AI and introduced many interesting questions and ideas. Having in mind our involvement in the technology testing and researching potential uses, the most inspiring and thought-provoking was the second day of the seminar, where speakers talked about how AI should be regulated and how putting recent AI technologies, like ChatGPT, into practice can affect privacy, copyrights, labor, security, and much more.

In the end, all of us should be aware that AI, while becoming more and more powerful every day and with more and more super useful functionalities, is still nowhere near Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). And although it is far away from AGI and what we call singularity, it still introduces interesting use cases and brings concerns of different sorts to the world we know and live in. It is worth mentioning that even the greatest minds in this domain are expressing concerns about how AI is used and how we should carefully guide and regulate its use.

Check out this TED talk given by Garry Marcus, a psychologist and cognitive scientist and emeritus professor at New York University. He is one of the advocates for AI regulation, and a critic of the “hype” surrounding AI.