1 February 2024

While AI has been a hot topic in the community, much was discussed among teachers as to how to prepare lessons, how to use it in learning and teaching, and how to distinguish the extent of AI assistance in student work. While no teachers profess to be experts in the area, many take the one-step-at-a-time attitude and hope that they will cross the bridge when they come to it. That is, when information is generated too quickly, users have little time to digest and verify before the next piece arrives, unlike the conventional research work. That opens the security loophole.

We heard much news on AI-generated faces of one’s acquaintance or relatives and earn the trust of an individual for additional information or financial implications over the video or telephone calls.  Each of us has a dozen friends who have fallen victims to scam phone calls with their real personal information and wish them to conduct money transaction acts. The least harmful and the most common ones are to use enhanced apps to beautify one’s face on video cameras or photos. The fun applications that our youngsters enjoy had become an avenue for evil deeds.

A year ago, a lawyer used ChatGPT to research for a 2019 case, little did he know that AI fabricated research information. The result was devastating, and AI seemed to go rogue. When the real and the unreal cannot be distinguished,  one’s orientation will be completely shattered. We always hear about Mandela Effect; what if going rogue, or being misused, as a deliberate attempt to confuse our minds and information?  While sometimes we cannot tell an experience from a dream, the complications produced by AI security would pose further threats to our everyday life, let alone national security.

While education should break the mould every now and then in order to develop students’ potential, the breaking sometimes is a risk and a danger in itself. We want to balance between one-step-at-a-time  concept and competitions with others, but the security at any level, or any form, should not be a price to pay.

 

Anson Yang