by: Rajagopal TampiPosted on:

The waning power of IT customers

What’s happening currently in AI?

The power of the IT consumer has been waning gradually and is now set to accelerate further. The following 6 statements indicate this trend:

  1. Microsoft Terms and Conditions agreement is about to change. The notice says that if one does not agree then one must stop using MS products by Sep 30, 2024.
  2. Apple slipped in a Journal app quietly in one of its OS updates some time ago. The most personal data of individuals is being stored by Apple without specific clarity on its protection mechanisms.
  3. Apple has announced the integration of Chat GPT with the Mac OS1.
  4. Two hundred employees of DeepMind, a top-secret AI lab of Google have written a letter emphasizing the ethical implications of using AI in military applications2.
  5. Meta has added the Llama3 AI icon in WhatsApp without any notice or explanation to users.
  6. Meta T&C “By using AIs, you are instructing us to share your information with third parties when it may provide you with more relevant or useful responses. Those third parties will use any information that we share – which may include personal information about you or others – in accordance with those third parties’ privacy policies.”

Case no 1 – The wording is authoritarian and far from customer centric. A customer’s investment of money and their familiarity with its products do not seem to matter to Microsoft. Leave alone the learning curve, difficulty, and costs of migrating to an alternative product.

Case No 2: Apple is surreptitiously gathering the most personal data without adequate education of its customers. With the increasing adoption of AI in most levels of society, the danger of sharing personal information has skyrocketed.

Case No 3: It will not be possible to determine which vendor is misusing personal data when integration is being done at the OS level. The main criterion for fair play and monitoring is ensuring clear responsibilities and accountability, which will not be possible with OS level integration.

Case No 4: This is denying the rights of users to opt out to guard their privacy. No such option has been given. I have personally raised a request to remove the icon from my WhatsApp feed to WhatsApp support. I have a reference number for the complaint too. It has been more than two weeks and there has been no response.

Case No 5: If employees are willing to risk losing their jobs, there must be critical dangers resulting from providing access to DeepMind’s AI to defence users. Moreover, this is against the stated policies of Google, its parent company.

Case No 6: This is a most audacious statement from Meta through which it makes it appear that the company does not consider it a high priority to protect users’ personal data.

Causes

It is difficult to understand the true causes of this waning power of customers. Let us make a fair and independent case for both Tech Titans and their customers.

The root cause of the increase in power wielded by Tech Titans is indicative of a maturing IT industry into AI based products and services form pure software services.

Compare IT’s progress with the packaged food industry. We don’t get to choose what’s in the food package, yet we have a range of different types of food packets to choose from, different contents and varying prices. If we don’t like one, we can choose another based on our taste and affordability. They are ready in a packaged, tested and labelled form on the shelves. The government and health regulatory agencies ensure quality and health specifications and details of ingredients along with calorific values, fitness for consumption testing and certification. This sort of progress has happened in the food and beverages industry over many decades and after regulation has evolved to meet the needs and safety of consumers. It did not exist when the first peanuts were sold in paper cones. There would have been many cases of suffering and human lives lost due to inadequate heath inspection, testing and regulatory oversight.

The emergence of AI has suddenly pushed apps into our personal lives, consuming our confidential information. It has impacted jobs, our livelihoods, safety and the way we communicate, resulting in significant problems in the areas of ethics, human and data rights, bias, job loss and security. The AI transition has been so swift that there has not even been time enough to understand its effects in a logical and scientific way. Tech Titans do have themselves to blame for not analysing and designing Human-Centric and Explainable AI systems which is squarely their moral responsibility. In this they have failed. Yet market forces shape survival strategies in industries and IT is no exception.  Tech Titans pushed forward with innovation and commercialization of AI with half-baked analysis and design understanding.

Conclusion

The book “Applied Human-Centric AI3” talks of the great breadth and depth of analysis and design work that needs to be done by AI companies to be able to build an ethical, unbiased, safe and quality tested AI product which considers human-centric needs.

“Of greatest importance is perhaps the analysis of AI’s interactions with human beings and our lives. What is the relationship equation between humans and AI? Who is the master? Can AI’s self-learning capability and its progress by leaps and bounds make it the master? What is the scenario and relationship that we humans prefer to have with AI? How will the AI- human relationship change over time? Who hold the reins to these changes?”3

This progress can happen only, after the collapse of the AI hype presently in vogue around the LLMs like Chat GPT and others. Then the permeation of AI into real businesses processes and genuine individual needs will occur. By then, the AI industry should meet their moral responsibility by genuinely analysing and designing AI/ML systems in a human-centric and explainable manner.  

The Government is waiting in the wings to set in place appropriate regulation, testing, packaging, labelling and certifying dangerous AI use cases. Unless both government and Tech Titans work together it will not be possible to productize AI in a manner somewhat similar to the Food and Beverages industry. Until the AI industry transforms itself to deliver products which are packaged, labelled, priced, regulated and marketed respecting human centricity and safety in a similar way as in the F& B industry we should not hope for any genuine runaway growth for AI.

References:

  1. Apple Intelligence: iPhone partners ChatGPT for AI integration
  2. https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/topstories/google-s-top-secret-ai-department-deepmind-labs-urges-company-to-drop-military-contracts/ar-AA1pirVd?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=LCTS&cvid=3d823dc509904eaaa50482ae58e4ed43&ei=30
  3. Applied Human-Centric AI by Rajagopal Tampi

Author:  P Rajagopal Tampi

Web-site: https://aipathfinder.org

Disclaimer: This article represents the author’s own views. It does not try to cast aspersions on any company, the IT industry or national governments.

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