Damien Williams interviewed for ‘Is AI Worth It? A Growing Number of Artificial-Intelligence Skeptics Is Raising Doubts About a Utopian Future’
Source: Nob Hill Gazette
Many have started to question whether the benefits of AI — or at least generative AI, the version of the technology that can mimic human-created writing, images and software code and that has dominated the industry since OpenAI first released ChatGPT in late 2022 — are worth the myriad downsides.
Damien P. Williams, an assistant professor at UNC Charlotte, says his colleagues in the University’s School of Data Science who have used generative AI for coding are constantly on alert for errors.
That such systems can converse with people in natural language is truly impressive and marks a significant advance in computer-human interaction, Williams says. But the fact that the responses can’t be trusted to be accurate undermines it, he says, asking, “A large-language model that can converse fluidly and very confidently about factually incorrect statements does me what good?”