Trust in AI

“The world of enterprise software is going to get completely rewired. Companies with untrustworthy AI will not do well in the market.” Abhay Parasnis, CEO of Typeface

AI has the potential to disrupt and innovate our society on every level and in every industry, to transform the ways in which we work, and to make it easier and safer for us. There are countless examples in which AI and robotics have been used to automate dangerous and high-risk tasks in mining, commercial truck driving, agriculture and even space exploration. Furthermore, AI also holds immense potential for automating all of the mundane tasks that we have to do, day by day.

Currently, the landscape is dominated by large tech companies such as Google, Meta and OpenAI which drive innovation and dictate the tone. To better understand the trends in public opinion relative to AI, it is essential to analyse the most popular AI tools that have become intensely circulated lately. The most popular AI breakthrough in the last few years is, without a doubt, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot powered by an LLM. Amassing more than 180 million users, it has been the main trigger in kicking off the Generative AI race. Other examples include Stable Diffusion - a deep learning text-to-image model used to generate images based on prompts and GitHub’s Copilot - an AI tool for generating code.

However, we must not confuse popularity with trust. With little education in AI & ML, the general public does not have the tools necessary to properly understand who to trust. In spite of all of the breakthroughs in AI, many issues are surfacing when it comes to how the data is sourced, how it is used, and what it produces, with more AI incidents and controversies being reported in AIAAC with each passing year.

It comes as no surprise that the 2021 global survey carried out by IPSOS and Pew Research uncovered that more than 50% of the population doesn’t trust companies that use AI, as much as the others, with numbers hitting even lower in the US, at 35%. That same year, the poll conducted by Lloyd’s Register Foundation together with Gallup also found that around 30% of the populus considers AI as potentially harmful to mankind. This trend is not improving in time, with KPMG’s 2023 survey revealing that only 40% of Australians trust AI products.

In contrast with the public opinion and growing concerts about its maturity, governments and the industry are pushing the AI revolution across sectors, with deployments reaching a national scale, in mission critical areas such as electrical grids and food chains. As an equal and opposite reaction, the scientific community is retaliating through initiatives such as Hugging Face, in an effort to democratise machine learning, and to educate and open up machine learning to the software engineering community as a whole. The “Machine Learning For The Masses!” mantra is gaining traction with many AI enthusiasts of all technical backgrounds joining in.