“Unleash all this creativity”: Google AI’s breathtaking potential — from axios.com by Jennifer Kingson
Excerpt:
Google’s research arm on Wednesday showed off a whiz-bang assortment of artificial intelligence (AI) projects it’s incubating, aimed at everything from mitigating climate change to helping novelists craft prose.
Why it matters: AI has breathtaking potential to improve and enrich our lives — and comes with hugely worrisome risks of misuse, intrusion and malfeasance, if not developed and deployed responsibly.
Driving the news: The dozen-or-so AI projects that Google Research unfurled at a Manhattan media event are in various stages of development, with goals ranging from societal improvement (such as better health diagnoses) to pure creativity and fun (text-to-image generation that can help you build a 3D image of a skirt-clad monster made of marzipan).
…
The “1,000 Languages Initiative”: Google is building an AI model that will work with the world’s 1,000 most-spoken languages.
- AI “can have immense social benefits” and “unleash all this creativity,” said Marian Croak, head of Google Research’s center of expertise on responsible AI.
- “But because it has such a broad impact on people, the risk involved can also be very huge. And if we don’t get that right … it can be very destructive.”
…
And as Axios’ Scott Rosenberg has written, society is only just beginning to grapple with the legal and ethical questions raised by AI’s new capacity to generate text and images.