CLEVELAND — Artificial intelligence is the new Wild West, and there’s a push to rein it in.
"There's no doubt that we have to be smart about how we use this new tool," Ohio Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted said.
For state business, Ohio just unveiled a multi-agency AI council, along with guidelines to ensure AI helps the state grow while providing some guardrails to its dangers.
"AI is a reality that's going to be in our lives, that we need to educate ourselves on it, that we need to identify how to use it for good and to build barriers for how it will be used to negatively impact our lives," Husted added. "But understand that there are bad actors out there who will try to steal things from you, try to manipulate you, try to deceive you."
“Ohio needed this guiding policy to leverage the power of AI while also protecting the data behind this rapidly changing technology."
— Lt. Governor Jon Husted (@LtGovHusted) December 5, 2023
-Lt. Governor @JonHusted
🗞️ Ohio Creates Policy and Council to Govern Statewide AI Usehttps://t.co/nhVMgDuzsd
News 5 reported earlier this year how Cleveland hosted an artificial intelligence conference to learn how to harness and market its power, as well as how to be a skeptical but informed user.
"You should question everything that you know is coming out in a digital way," Husted said. "I view AI as fire. It can keep you warm and make your food taste better, and create comfort in your lives and a better quality of life. But it also can burn your house down and all of your goods and your possessions. We have to learn how to control it for good and try to minimize the negative impacts in our lives."
Local business tinkers with AI to save time
The policy comes as AI is permeating every facet of our lives, from business to education, finance and content creation.
Dave Gruss, owner of the apparel company "We Bleed Ohio," utilizes the old-school method of making t-shirts by handprinting all of them. However, as old as his methods are, his store does dabble in artificial intelligence. He doesn't use it for graphic design but more for coming up with tedious product descriptions.
"It’s pretty good," Gruss said. "I used to try to come up with clever fun things like that but apparently it wasn't SEO optimized so the AI helps with that."
Meta unveils AI for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp
The explosion of AI is everywhere. In addition to the major players of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI and others, Meta just launched "Imagine with Meta AI."
An image generator capable of creating whatever a user can dream, and in theory, help save time and energy.
"Hopefully that saves small business owners lots of time and helps them create something new and visually engaging that captures their audience and gives them more attention versus other businesses," Lori Moylan, Meta Public Policy Director, explained.
Moylan points out that while the image generator can create almost anything, the company is working to ensure others know it's not real.
"If you were generating something that was truly photo-realistic, and then you were going to try to use it in a more nefarious way, you wouldn't be able to," she explained. "A little watermark would exist on the image, which would let people know that the image they're seeing was generated with AI."
In addition to the watermark that could be cropped out, Moylan told News 5 that there are invisible watermarks embedded in the metadata (no pun intended) of an image to point out that the image is generated by artificial intelligence.
"Misinformation on the internet is nothing new," Moylan said. "AI certainly opens up a new front in that conversation about how consumers and the people who use our services and use to use other services on the internet need to make sure that they're educating themselves and staying informed. AI will just increase the responsibility that we all have to be smart and critical thinking consumers."
"People are gonna try to manipulate images," Husted said. "They're going to try to distort things to make it seem better: food to look more tasty, vacation sites to look more enticing, your political opponents to look more sinister. All of those kinds of things out there in life are subject to manipulation and we should question not what, just what we read and what we hear."
Clay LePard is a special projects reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow him on Twitter @ClayLePard or on Facebook Clay LePard News 5.
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