Spot the Fake: AI Edition

Artificial Intelligence is approaching human intelligence.

• TRUE

• FALSE

Answer explanation

While AI systems are nearing or outperforming human beings at increasingly complex tasks like generating musical melodies or playing the game of Go, they remain narrow and brittle, and lack true agency or creativity. It’s not that AI has chosen to create a melody, or understands that sounds make music. Rather, researchers have built tools to recognize patterns in melodies and use them to project similar patterns based on their guidance. AI systems that generate melodies cannot currently be used to generate realistic speech, much less paint a picture or play chess. Techniques like transfer learning are bringing us closer to AI systems that can apply their learning to multiple problems, but machines with human intelligence remain a long way off. (taken from: Google's Exploring 6 AI Myths)

Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are all the same thing

• TRUE

• FALSE

Answer explanation

While artificial intelligence (AI) is a convenient and commonplace term, it has no widely agreed-upon technical definition. One helpful way to think about AI is as the science of making things smart. Much of the recent progress we’ve seen in AI is based on machine learning (ML), a subfield of AI where computers learn and recognize patterns from examples, rather than being programmed with specific rules. There are many different ML techniques, but deep learning is a particularly popular one right now. Deep learning is based on neural network technology, an algorithm whose architecture is inspired by the human brain and can learn to recognize pretty complex patterns, such as what “hugs” are or what a “party” looks like. (taken from: Google's Exploring 6 AI Myths)

Artificial Intelligence detection is an unreliable and risky proposition, especially in high-stakes situations.

• TRUE

• FALSE

Answer explanation

The reality is that AI detectors are built using the same systems that generate AI writing. AI detection is at best a probability and never a certainty. The detector is going to analyze the writing, looking for statistical patterns of word choice, sentence variation, structure, transitions, and complexity. It is guessing about the percentage of the writing that is AI. (taken from: Edutopia's article AI Detectors: What Teachers Should Know about AI Detectors)

Artificial Intelligence is not intelligent.

• TRUE

• FALSE

Answer explanation

Intelligence is a property inherent to living creatures – it allows us to learn, communicate, understand, empathize, and make decisions. AI is an attempt to simulate that or create similar results using a machine, but it is still only that – a mechanical simulation that may appear to produce some of the same results as natural intelligence. (taken from: Forbes' article Debunking AI Myths: The Truth Behind 5 Common Misconceptions)

Artificial Intelligence is neutral and unbiased.

• TRUE

• FALSE

Answer explanation

AI comes from machines, so it’s understandable that people not familiar with the way it works would assume that it would always take a fair and balanced stance and be free from bias. Unfortunately, this isn't true, as AI algorithms only “know” anything at all because they are trained on data, and this data is often created or curated by humans. This means that, particularly with larger datasets, it’s almost inevitable that some human biases will creep in and affect the output of the algorithms. AI is only as good as the data that it's trained on, and a warning that's commonly given about any computer system is that "garbage in = garbage out." (taken from: Forbes' article Debunking AI Myths: The Truth Behind 5 Common Misconceptions)