“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.