Z Inman, Digital Media Lead

What is AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a topic is highly prominent in the modern day world and its usage is nothing far from widespread.

AI is code. Humans have to teach technology this code, as if it was a child, feeding it data and knowledge that it can learn from to create something new.

The Benefits of AI

We are seeing a lot more usage of AI within day-to-day life, for example within smartphones, such as with live translation or assisting people in foreign countries if they need support with a basic conversation.

Another major benefit is within healthcare, leading to one of the largest publicly available x-ray datasets of scans of the torso and lung area, from more than 30,000 patients. These were fed to AI (with the patient’s permission) to learn patterns, so that it could detect small details that a doctor could not, and much faster, helping to keep us safer and healthier.

One of the many positives of AI is its usage within security systems, such as Ring Doorbell, who use AI for motion tracking and object detection to let you know who is at your front door.

There is certainly a bright side to AI, one full of ingenuity and interesting developments that are made almost every day. AI could be classed as a brain in tis won entity, hardwired to do one task, constantly learning patterns and pathways that assists itself to reach its goal faster, leading to exponential growth in knowledge and decreased processing time. The more it learns, the quicker it adapts.

Can you spot the AI errors?

Although AI is developing rapidly, you can sometimes spot clues in its errors.

AI bots are able to take any given prompt, and by utilising a massive set of data from the internet, can create a completely unique image that takes pieces of data and makes them into an amalgamation of that data. For example, it could create an image that look like this:

The fact that AI imagery, in such an early age, could get to this degree of accuracy, is amazing. However there are some major errors. Can you sport them?  

The right tooth is noticeably larger. This is an issue with data being mixed and mashed, creating objects larger than necessary and in directions that make it difficult to generate.

Take a closer look at the woman’s eyes. Both of the eyes should be similar sizing and colouring; you can see that they are  different from each other.

Additionally, we see a mismatching of a reflection on the surface of the water. Reflections matching objects are difficult for AI as it has separate references for each and cannot use photoshopping techniques or methods of imagery that we use.

Did you notice a difficult-to-identify object that seems to have morphed to create a confusing and physically impossible object?

And what about the air around the woman’s hair seemingly morphing and warping around the shapes of the loose and open strands? Additionally, the tiling in the background of the photo is inconsistent. The hardness of each of the lines is not the same, and it would seem that most of the colour has begun to blend together.

Problems with AI

Although it brings many wonderful advances for the future, issues have started to emerge.

One of the biggest concerns is the loss of jobs. For example, we are seeing more and more usage of AI within advertising and graphic design, taking away from the talented artists and graphic designers that could have previously designed these. A recent example of this is the iconic Coca Cola Christmas advert, that was made completely with the use of AI in 2024.

There are also concerns about the safety of AI, with countless news stories about driverless car malfunctions, for example.

Numerous legal battles will arise with the data from artists’ work being copied or even people deciding to claim themselves to be ‘AI artists’ when they have put near zero effort into creating their image. You get no sense of achievement or accomplishment from the usage of AI.

The reliance on AI to most seems like something that will never occur, but to myself and many others, it is a scary reality that could come to fruition. Much alike to many dystopian films, books and TV series, we are seeing a real-life version of this, with each of us having a front row ticket.

Conclusions

Ultimately AI has enormous benefits and, if you enjoy studying STEM subjects, then there could be many opportunities to engineer or create some exciting advances to help people in the future. We must also balance this by being aware of the problems AI causes and working honestly and ethically as we move forward.