There is no denying that AI is the future. It will unlock doors to new vistas and make it possible to do things that once seemed impossible.

We will talk to our cars, we will argue with our virtual assistants, and even break new records in sports with the help of AI coaches.

The truth is we all are enchanted by AI, the amazing things it can do, and the real-world problems AI can solve.

But there is also another dark side to AI which we cannot ignore. Dangers of AI are no longer movie fiction. They are real and right in front of us. If we do not become aware now, it will be too late.

In this blog, I will walk you through 10 such critical AI threats that we need to become aware of this year and in the future. Let’s begin:

10 Threats of AI that We Need to be Aware of in 2021

1. AI Promoting Racism & Biasedness

The idea behind AI was to create systems that are free from hate, racism, and biased opinions that are gripping us humans.

However, what if AI systems also start promoting racism, hate, and biasedness?

Something like this happened back in 2016 when a Microsoft AI chatbot called Tay went full Nazi on Twitter and started tweeting Nazi sentiments and racial epithets. Things blew so much out of proportion that Microsoft had to take the AI offline in just 16 hours.

It turned out that the AI was trying to mimic the behavior of other human users who were deliberately provoking it.

It is not the only scenario of AI promoting biasedness. There are many examples of AI systems that are partial to ethnic minorities compared to the white population.

This leads to a serious concern that all these poor values of us humans can be passed to AI systems as well and it will only make things worse.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. The Messenger Rules for European Facebook Pages Are Changing. Here’s What You Need to Know

2. This Is Why Chatbot Business Are Dying

3. Facebook acquires Kustomer: an end for chatbots businesses?

4. The Five P’s of successful chatbots

2. AI Impacting Jobs

A few days back, I was reading a post on LinkedIn which talked about how AI is going to replace most of the jobs in the future.

“Nearly 400–800 million jobs will be replaced by AI by the year 2030 and 375 million people will have to look for other career options.” The post mentioned.

Hence, AI automating jobs is a serious concern that can lead to increased unemployment, depressed youth, and even worse violence.

AI is even making it worse for job seekers to look for new jobs. Most of the job applications are rejected by applicant tracking systems right away.

While recruiters call it filtering out ideal candidates, there are times when even the most promising candidates cannot make it to the shortlist. This way both the job seekers and the recruiters suffer.

3. AI Violating Privacy

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2016 shook us to the core. For the first time, we understood that our private details are not private anymore.

We are generating 2.5 million terabytes of data each day. Ever wondered how much damage can an AI system with access to this much data do?

Companies can influence our behavior and make us do what they want. They can make us buy their products, vote for people who align with their purpose, and support decisions that are in their favor.

This way our decisions will no longer be ours. We will just end up becoming a puppet in the hands of organizations who are willing to stoop to any level for profit.

4. AI Promoting Unreliability and Fake News

One of the biggest achievements of AI is that it is capable of creating content on its own. There are apps in the market that can create faces, compose texts, write tweets, and clone voices. It can help a lot in advertising.

However, people with malicious intent are using the same software to spread fake news, rumors, and blackmail others.

So, it is not much difficult for someone to take your photo, create a fake video, and then blackmail you saying they will release it to your friends. There is even a term for all this called Face swap Video blackmailing.

Even worse they may release the video. Then what? Your hard-earned reputation will be gone in just a few minutes. The worst part is no one will even bother if it is true or not.

Celebrities and politicians are already falling prey to this threat and soon it will also haunt people like me and you.

5. AI-driven Attacks

Even the most blissful things turn into a curse when they fall into wrong hands, and no analogy can describe this better than AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) not only took cybersecurity to the next level but also opened doors to new threats.

We are no longer facing old-fashioned, commodity malware human-driven attacks. Cyber-terrorists have evolved. They are now leveraging AI to attack and shut down systems.

All thanks to AI, cracking safe systems, encrypting secure chats, and hacking into highly confidential websites is a piece of cake for cybercriminals.

Can you even imagine how much damage it can do?

6. Increasing Influence of Major Tech Companies

Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and Amazon. These are the eight most powerful companies in the world. They have the power and financial capacity to take the power of AI to a whole new level.

So, such a powerful technology will end in the hands of a few players who can utilize it the way they want and serve their best interests. This puts at the risk of data monopoly and control.

7. AI Resulting in Loss of Skills

Apart from making our life easy breezy by simplifying complex tasks, AI is also making us lose touch with things that made us human.

We no longer write with our hands, read books, go on little walks, or spend time with nature. Instead of talking to family members, we spend hours looking at our phones and smiling like idiots.

It is like we are losing real-life skills and becoming increasingly dependent on technology, and this is not a good thing. It will deprive us of everything that makes us human and turn us into the slaves of the same technology which was expected to make our life better.

8. Autonomous Weapons

“Mark my words — AI is far more dangerous than nukes.” Elon Musk had said in a Southwest tech conference back in 2018, warning about the impact of autonomous weapons controlled by AI.

Along with 115 other experts, Mr. Musk had pointed out the potential threats of autonomous weapons and the level of damage they can do.

What he said makes complete sense. Technology has evolved and the worst part is that it is easily accessible. You can buy a high-quality drone with a camera that you control from your phone, install facial-recognition software on the drone, and use it to track and hunt the specific person you hold a grudge against.

Would we want that? Making it so easy for someone to take someone’s life that too sitting on their couch controlling the drone from miles away?

Even worse, what if the AI takes it upon itself to make decisions about life and death? There will be a massacre which is something we would never want.

9. AI Superintelligence

Here is something I find myself wondering the most:

What if one day we build a system that is far more intelligent than us humans and it decides to take over the world?

Although I am not the only one who is raising this concern, most of the times it is refuted in the name of fear fed by movies.

But this is the time we should start taking this threat seriously. AI is getting more powerful than before. We are developing AI systems that are defeating current chess champions, we are creating robots that are behaving like humans, we are creating virtual assistants that do a much better job than a personal secretary.

How long do you think it will take for someone to create a system that is more intelligent than humans? When that happens, things will be drastic.

The last thing we would want is a Terminator-like scenario in which machines have taken over the world and killer robots are roaming freely down the street.

10. Liability of Actions

“Who is responsible for the accidents caused by self-driving cars?” Experts often find themselves wondering.

It is the main reason why self-driving cars faced a lot of backlash from legal authorities when companies decided to launch them in the market. They just could not decide who they should hold accountable if accidents happen, the car owner or the company who designed the self-driving car.

It is not just the self-driving cars. Authorities have similar concerns in scenarios in which AI went rogue after learning by itself and started drawing its own conclusions.

Authorities often wonder whether they should blame the company or the AI itself, and they still do not have a reliable answer.

How to Overcome These AI Threats

• We should feed the right information to AI systems because they behave as per the information, we will feed them.
• Enterprises should automate wisely. Automating routine mundane tasks is wise, but there are still areas that will need human involvement.
• Consider using a VPN software. It prevents the misuse of your crucial data by keeping your details confidential on the web.
• Employee training is a must. They should be aware of how to use AI and what things they have to keep in mind for preventing any wrongdoing.
• Recruiters should use applicant tracking systems but should avoid relying on them entirely. This will ensure they do not lose deserving candidates just because an AI did not deem them fit.
• People should keep enhancing their skills. This will always keep them in demand. Remember while AI can replace labor, it cannot replace skills.
• There should be strict laws regarding what companies are doing with the data we are sharing online.
• Social media channels should use the power of AI to keep a check on accounts that are spreading hate, racism, and biasedness. Instagram is already shadowbanning such accounts and hashtags. In fact, it is one of the main reasons for the hashtags not working on social media accounts.
• We need to be aware of how much information we are sharing online so that it will not be misused.
• We need to keep a strict check on AI systems that are capable of creating content. There should be strict guidelines that prevent the misuse of someone’s private information without their consent, and those who do so should be strictly punished.
• Cybersecurity has to evolve. Only AI can overcome the threat of AI attacks. Businesses have to start thinking about taking advanced security measures like cybersecurity mesh.
• Authorities must draw strict guidelines on how companies can leverage AI. Some governments also took this decision by banning apps that were using AI for spying and other harmful purposes.
• We should use AI as it is improving our life but not become increasingly dependent on it. We should lose touch with skills that make us human so that we can survive when technology is not around. We need to find the balance.
• Companies and scientists who are developing AI must not lose conscience as it will play a critical role in deciding how an AI system will behave.
• Companies should take responsibility and ensure the use of AI happens for the good of society.

In a Nutshell

I would love to quote a few words from the video I was recently watching on YouTube:

“AI machines do not have a conscience. The way they act is just the reflection of human consciousness.”

Hence, it is essential we humans do not lose our consciousness when developing these AI systems. Instead of passing down all the racism, greed, biasedness, and bigotry — we should pass them the right information.

After all, we would want AI to become our great partner, not the evillest version of ourselves. It is the only thing that will help keep us on the right path and ensure AI does not become a threat to our existence.

And the best way to do so is now — because it is now or never, and tomorrow will be too late. What are your thoughts?

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

10 Threats of Artificial Intelligence that We Need to Be Aware of in 2021 was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

submitted by /u/roxanneonreddit
[link] [comments]

submitted by /u/jorenwouters
[link] [comments]

5 Ways to Prepare Your Chatbots for The Holidays: Chinese New Year Edition

Tip #1: Give your chatbot avatar a festive outfit for Chinese New Year

We know that having a cute chatbot avatar is enticing and important to many users, so we’re encouraging you to make your chatbot avatar look even more adorable by dressing them up for the holiday season.

What better way to ring in the holidays than to change your chat header, icon, and avatar’s outfit to be Chinese New Year-themed? It’s super simple to do so – all you have to do is go to the Noodle Factory portal and click on ‘Chat Channels’.

P.S. Did you know that you can use GIFs in your chat headers and icons? Yup, you really can use your favourite moving pictures!

Conversational AI has been on the radar for many organisations over the last few years. The challenges of the pandemic have brought the technology to the forefront of many businesses’ priority investment lists because of its ability to provide connectivity and on demand support. In fact, industry analysts Markets and Markets predict that by 2025 the Conversational AI industry will grow from $4.8 billion in 2020 to $13.9 billion in 2025.

With such demand, it is important for organisations to understand what exactly Conversational AI is and how to implement it to achieve transformative efficiencies and the outcomes desired.

What is Conversational AI?

Chatbots have been around since the early 1960s, getting slightly more sophisticated as the decades rolled on, but only as proof points of what was to come downstream. By the mid-2000s, chatbots began to be commercially deployed, automating basic customer requests, but largely proving to be disappointing and frustrating as their binary nature was limiting, often resulting in hilarious ‘rabbit holes’ of confusion with customers ultimately desperate for a real person to contact.

Over the last five years, rapid advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) combined with access to affordable computer processing has seen Conversational AI solutions emerge as the successor to the unsuccessful early attempts at automating repetitive tasks. User experiences delivered today are unrecognisable from the early chatbots with many interactions now indistinguishable from that of a human.

Crucially, these solutions can handle an ever-growing number of more complex tasks and requests. Furthermore, some Conversational AI Assistants solutions are now able to seamlessly integrate with enterprise applications, gathering data and information and presenting personalised responses back to the individual requestee. All the while respecting security parameters and data sensitivity.

What are the benefits?

Conversational AI enables organisations to provide an on-demand support resource for customers, suppliers, and employees. Its utilisation of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning means that the technology is able to understand the meaning and intent of user queries in a much more personalised and sophisticated manner than chatbots.

This means that organisations can provide significantly enhanced experiences and improves customer and employee satisfaction leading to greater retention and brand reputation. Additionally, the Assistants deliver time savings and efficiencies to internal teams such as HR and Customer Service through streamlining the handling of requests, freeing them up to focus on more strategic and higher-value tasks.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. The Messenger Rules for European Facebook Pages Are Changing. Here’s What You Need to Know

2. This Is Why Chatbot Business Are Dying

3. Facebook acquires Kustomer: an end for chatbots businesses?

4. The Five P’s of successful chatbots

From a technology perspective, Conversational AI offers many advantages over traditional chatbots, through the platforms ability to learn as a natural consequence of processing but also through automated training and ingestion of documents to create user journeys

This means platforms such as Humley’s Conversational Assistant require no coding or technical knowledge to set up, putting the power in subject matter experts’ hands rather than IT teams, leading to rapid deployment and realisation of ROI.

Steps to deploying a Conversational AI Assistant

1. Identify a Use Case

With AI and automation technologies becoming such a top investment priority for enterprises, AI for AI’s sake can tend to lead the project objectives rather than the business case itself.

‍For example, a customer service team has been given a budget to investigate automate customer care. They have identified that a chatbot will enable them to do this, however, upon implementation have discovered that the technology is not returning the efficiencies they were hoping for.

Consequently, the project fails to scale or move past POC. Yet when it comes to addressing the reason for the failure, the technology is working as intended, rather it is the internal company processes that have created a barrier. On closer examination, the challenges that the customer service team faced are not an inability to handle call volumes, but rather the internal processes and systems that do not allow them to do it efficiently.

The problem within this scenario is that the team has not understood what problem they are trying to solve. In order to ensure the success of any project, organisations and teams must truly understand the outcomes they are looking to achieve and whether Conversational AI is the most appropriate solution to achieve this.

Example Business Cases Where Conversational AI Can Help

HR

A Conversational Assistant within HR eliminates the need for employees and managers to navigate complex HR, Payroll, and Business systems and reduces the pressure on HR Teams through automating all of the common HR requests and associated tasks. Delivering improved compliance, awareness, productivity, and employee engagement leading to increased retention and satisfaction.

IT & Help Desks

Reduce the pressure on IT Teams by enabling users to resolve their own tech issues and queries quickly and seamlessly. Assistants enable users to ask general IT questions, submit tickets, and even set up new devices and system access.

Contact Centres

Conversational Assistants help to reduce the pressure on contact centres by providing agents with a single point of reference for all customer information as well as enabling customers to self-serve through resolving their own queries. Reducing waiting times, increasing first-time case resolution rates, and improving customer experiences.

2. Creating User Journeys

One of the major challenges faced by organisations looking to implement a Conversational Assistant is establishing the likely customer, employee, or supplier interactions. This task can be complex and time-consuming, typically relying on functional teams such as HR, Sales, Support, and IT to understand and identify the wide variety of queries and outcomes. This can take up valuable resources and means projects may take longer to move to ‘live’ than anticipated, resulting in frustration and delays.

In order to, accelerate this process and reduce the pressure on functional teams, organisations must look to their existing knowledge base and documents to kickstart their deployments.

This approach not only significantly reduces the time and resource needed to build the platform, but also means that employees and customers can access the relevant information they require quickly — improving compliance, productivity, and satisfaction.

3. Iteration & Data

Data is a key part of any AI project, particularly if there is some element of Machine Learning or analytics. The principle here is laudable: the collection of data to understand user behaviour is essential, as is a clear understanding of what the technology success metrics are. However, the desire to keep these technologies in stasis during a trial period is perhaps a misunderstanding of what role applications such as Conversational AI must play.

There are two reasons for this. For example, Conversational AI will not have been trained correctly, have the right information or the experience of dealing with real people.

All of which means that within the first few days, weeks, and months the Assistant will need considerable care and attention. Providing this level of support, is perhaps not what a team was expecting and therefore can immediately reduce adoption and usage, particularly if some technical knowledge is required. Hence, iteration is crucial, and the success metrics need to be based on the rate of improvement as much as the overall accuracy of the service itself.

4. Onward Journey & Optimisation

Once the first use case has been successfully implemented and is deployed within a ‘live’ environment, the process can easily be scaled and repeated into other areas of the business, applying learnings and utilising the project successes to gain wider organisational adoption.

Continual optimisation is key to the ongoing success of any Digital Transformation project. Therefore, organisations and solution providers should ensure regular reviews and service monitoring as part of their processes.

Fundamentally, the success of any project is based on the strong relationship between key stakeholders, users, and technology vendors. Through adopting a collaborative and open approach to achieve the goals of the organisation, long-term success can be achieved.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

How to get started with Conversational AI was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are several new ideas arising from the emergence of artificial intelligence, and certainly, this cannot be denied. In chatbots, the sharp use of AI is itself a major achievement because you have ever found that in terms of features, interface, purpose, and more, the two or more chatbot styles are never the same. Isn’t it an achievement that two or more working under the same system are not the? However, I will be discussing the top 3 purpose chatbot types that shall be the best to look upon for maximum business growth in 2021.

1. Support Chatbots:

Support chatbots are programmed to master a single domain, such as company information. It is important for these chatbots to have character, multi-turn functionality, and context awareness. They should be able to walk a customer through some major business processes and answer a broad range of FAQ-type questions. You would want to have a short-tail and long-tail combo solution when developing this chatbot type.

This chatbot functionality is not limited to support areas, but it can also manage ticket booking and scheduling. Tickets such as flight status check, book price, slots, scheduling, etc.

If you own an e-commerce business then support chatbots are the right solution for you, because it provides on a personal level development of the customer relationship. Also, solving the queries for cart abandonment.

2. Skills Chatbots:

These are usually more single-turn-type bots. They set commands which they can easily obey, such as “close the window” or “play Ed Sheeran’s song for me.” Speech functionality is suggested for this type of chatbot so that the user does not need to turn on a screen or click any buttons.

They can quickly follow commands so that users can do multitasking while dealing with the bot. These chatbots do not need to worry too much about contextual awareness unless you want to create a highly advanced one, as people can easily learn what to say and say it correctly.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. The Messenger Rules for European Facebook Pages Are Changing. Here’s What You Need to Know

2. This Is Why Chatbot Business Are Dying

3. Facebook acquires Kustomer: an end for chatbots businesses?

4. The Five P’s of successful chatbots

Did you know which industries are gaining from chatbots? The finance, healthcare, education, travel, and real estate industries. Also, roughly 80% of the businesses are projected to integrate some form of chatbot system by 2021.

3. Assistant Chatbots:

Assistant chatbots are a middle ground chatbots, more or less, between the two chatbots types above. They do better when they know a little bit about a variety of subjects. Many individuals hope that these bots will one day become navigators like all the other bots that are out there now.

Siri is a fine, modern example. While she just does so much and in virtual assistants she is phenomenal, individuals continuously ask her for things simply because even though she does not perform the order, the response she gives seems to be humorous.

— When companies implement automation strategies correctly, they can increase sales and brand awareness while saving time, effort, and money. Chatbots take on the responsibility for time-consuming, recurring tasks. They make communicating with consumers, adding value, and delivering better customer experiences simpler and easier.

So, get your one purpose chatbot today!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

3 Purpose Chatbot Types For Business Growth In 2021 was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Digital HR Assistant is an easy to use Conversational AI tool which enables employees to access all the information they need and perform tasks within one easy to use interface. Crucially Digital Assistants enables HR Teams to focus on the tasks that really matter, delivering strategic business value through automating repetitive and manually intensive tasks involved with processing communications and giving employees instant access to all the information they need in the channels they use, 24/7 regardless of location or time zone.

Meaningful and accurate responses to users in seconds — improving satisfaction and engagement.

How does it work?

Enable employees to ask questions and perform tasks associate with every stage on the employee lifecycle such as recruitment, onboarding, learning and development, day to day support.

Powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, Digital HR Assistants are able to understand and interpret human language to a much higher accuracy and therefore, able to provide meaningful and accurate responses to users in seconds — improving satisfaction and engagement.

The technology enables employees to ask questions and perform tasks associate with every stage on the employee lifecycle such as recruitment, onboarding, learning and development, day to day support such as booking holiday, timesheets and payroll enquiries, employee feedback and even offboarding processes .

A Digital Assistant can even support employee’s wellbeing by enabling them to seek advice without the need to speak to a person — allowing them to remain anonymous whilst still providing them with the right information and advice.

Additionally, Through intuitive dashboards and reports, the Assistants can even help HR Teams to provide employees with greater insight into employees through tracking metrics such as FAQs triggered, employee feedback and volume of communications. These metrics provide HR experts with an insight into employee satisfaction and proactively help to identify trends which could impact the long-term success of an organisation.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. The Messenger Rules for European Facebook Pages Are Changing. Here’s What You Need to Know

2. This Is Why Chatbot Business Are Dying

3. Facebook acquires Kustomer: an end for chatbots businesses?

4. The Five P’s of successful chatbots

More than your average chatbot …

The HR Assistant is the employee gateway to the business, the first and second port of call for all information and requests.

Where Digital HR Assistants differ from traditional chatbots is through their speed of deployment and ease of use. Many Digital HR Assistants, such as Humley’s, utilise automatic document ingestion in combination with pre built employee experiences to fast track the deployment process — this means there is no coding required, technical expertise or lengthy development periods.

Moreover, tools such as Humley’s Digital Assistant are Pre built with ready to deploy integrations with all of the leading HRIS, Payroll and other business systems. This means all an organisations information can be securely accessed, updated and actioned within one interface. This integration capability also enables the assistant to automate tasks such as travel booking, updating timesheets, and even booking candidate interviews through connecting with RPA and other automation technologies

The HR Assistant is the employee gateway to the business, the first and second port of call for all information and requests. Delivering true transformation and efficiencies through automation of end to end processes.

Key Benefits of deploying a Digital HR Assistant

• Improved employee experience & satisfaction
• Enhanced employee Support
• Improved compliance & adoption of handbooks & guidance
• Integration of all systems and information in one platform
• Task automation
• Efficiency gains for HR Teams
• Improved visibility of employee trends and feedback

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

What is a Digital HR Assistant and why does it matter? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

submitted by /u/Botmywork [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/ErebosGamer
[link] [comments]

submitted by /u/21twelveinteractive [link] [comments]