Generative AI possibilities and impacts focus of U of L talk

By Alejandra Pulido-Guzman - Lethbridge Herald on November 27, 2024.

Herald photo by Alejandra Pulido-Guzman Sidney Shapiro, assistant professor of business analytics in the University of Lethbridge's Dhillon School of Business, will explore the current state of Generative AI during the University of Lethbridge's PUBlic Professor series event on Thursday at the Slice Bar and Grill.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDapulido@lethbridgeherald.com

With Artificial Intelligence becoming part of daily life, the world of Generative AI will be the focus of the next University of Lethbridge’s PUBlic Professor Series event Thursday.

Sidney Shapiro, assistant professor of business analytics in the University of Lethbridge’s Dhillon School of Business, will explore the current state of Generative AI, its future possibilities and critically examine the impacts it could have on society Thursday at the Slice Bar and Grill.

Shapiro told the Herald recently that his talk is about the possibility of generative AI saving the world. He said that is something people are very passionate about on both sides of the argument.

 “I think the challenge is that a lot of people look at AI and ask, how do I put this into my work? How do I use it? And on the other hand, you have a lot of people who are worried about their jobs and that computers are going to replace them,” said Shapiro.

But Shapiro believes the truth is somewhere in the middle, as certain jobs are very easy to replicate by computers thanks to patterns for how they already work, like writing a resume, but any job that requires critical thinking still requires people in the loop.

 “Maybe they’re going to be helped by AI tools that will help them do their job faster or better, but at the end of the day, you really need to have someone thinking to figure out what direction should we go in and what pathway actually makes sense,” said Shapiro.

He explained that artificial intelligence is basically pathways that computers recognize and they can be trained to follow that pattern.

 “The idea of generative AI is that you collect more and more information and you have thousands or millions of words. You could look at the connections between those words and find the patterns that are most frequently used,” said Shapiro.

He said the problem is that generative AI is a big collection of words without anything new, it is basically a recycling of ideas that “come up” with an answer to an inquiry but it is not based on something new.

 “In other words, is putting together new connections between those pieces of data it already knows about. People can come up with brand new ideas, but computers can’t,” said Shapiro.

He added that another issue with AI is that it not always work the way people hope it would, it is not something someone can just plug into their business and expect accurate results, as something that happened with an airline using AI.

“There’s a very big scandal that happened with Air Canada, they had a chat bot and somebody asked for flight price. It told him the wrong information and the court said, well, that’s what your bot said so you have do it,” said Shapiro.

He said AI is not always a reason for bad decisions, in some cases it might actually be helpful for a business that deals with repetitive tasks like sending mass emails that are personalized for each costumer.

“Maybe you could just press a button and the AI program would ask what are all the orders the customers have done in the past? Tell me more about them. They go through your system and find all the information about them and then it writes the e-mail that says, hi, Bob, how are your kids doing, I see that you ordered 20 pizzas last time, how about ordering 30 this time?,” said Shapiro.

 But he emphasized that having AI run itself without a person being involved could end up terribly, and there are a lot of examples of it giving people the wrong advice.

 “That part of it gives people hope that they’re not going to be replaced by computers as they are actually capable of critical thinking unlike programs,” said Shapiro.

The event has reached capacity. For those who cannot attend, the talk will be available on the ULethbridge YouTube channel following the presentation.