every day it seems there's a new bewildering or frightening story about AI in the news how it's going to steal our jobs spread internet Bakery on a colossal scale and generally take over the world but what exactly is AI artificial intelligence and are the scare stories even true five things you really need to know about AI AI is as old as your grandparents so the first thing to note is that AI has been around a lot longer than you might think it's Roots lie in an idea known as an artificial neural network for the 1940s a neural network is a bit like a team of interconnected workers that learn to solve problems eat High may come up with a possible solution it's marked if there's room for improvement they adjust and change their connections over time the network becomes efficient and Technology powered by neural networks is all around us right now it suggests movies and music we might like it recognizes faces and objects when taking photos on smartphones enabling features like facial recognition it's heavily used by social media platforms to personalize our feeds more recently a form of AI known as generative AI is powering applications that can seemingly create new data it can also power chat Bots like open AIS chat GPT and Google's Bard which give human-like responses to questions these are getting better at interacting with us and seemingly more human-like this can seem scary but it's worth knowing 0.2 hey I can't feel or think if you ask chat GPT a question like this one why should we be concerned about AI it does a pretty good job at providing a response that appears logical and with that convincing human-like response it's easy for us to believe it understands what it's saying that it has feelings and motivations it's understandable that we do this but it's worth remembering right now ai can't think or feel can't love or hate chat GPT in its counterparts a sophisticated sentence completion apps that analyze our patterns of communication and provide responses similar to the way humans would typically reply a bit like a talking parrot which leads us to point number three AI make stuff up chatbots can have an awkward relationship with the truth technically known as AI hallucinations you could also describe it as making stuff up the core of the technology is a model that uses probability to predict the next word sentence or paragraph it can generate seemingly plausible replies but lacks the ability to assess truthfulness or the accuracy of its responses so anyone thinking of using chat bolts to write content needs to be careful then not incorporating credible sounding BS that could be easily spotted by someone who's actually done the research AI can sound racist and sexist the idea of a racist machine might seem far-fetched but if AI is trained on data that's racist biased or hateful then its output will be too as we all know racism biased and hateful content can be found in abundance online in 2016 Microsoft launched an experimental chatbot called tay but quickly pulled the plug after it made racist and offensive remarks it learned to do this from interacting with users on social media Microsoft apologized and promised to implement improved safety features in future this is why the ethical framework that governs any AI application is incredibly important and why many are calling for safeguards to prevent bias and hate speech to be built into AI systems AI has incredible potential for all the notes of caution it can be easy to forget as many potential benefits to AI it's set to truly revolutionize Healthcare AI has already discovered new drugs and is being used to identify cancer cells much more reliably than humans an AI chat Bots can behave like patient teachers When we struggle to understand a complex topic summarizing huge volumes of information for us the AI revolution has the potential to enhance and speed up work in many fields from software programming to animation to law enforcement and journalism this has pluses and minuses of course but could this extra capacity free us up to do other things like tackling climate change or looking after ourselves and each other better as AI advances governments and Regulators will of course need to make sure it's being used ethically and legally no easy feat but will AI take over the world don't forget AI is a tool and even a powerful tool can't take over the world on its own it's up to us to decide how we use it or even if we should use it at all