M+E Daily

Despite many people automatically thinking of what happens in the Terminator films when they hear the words artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the technologies are more likely to help creatives and other humans than take control of the world, according to Dr. Volker Steinbiss, managing director of AppTek GmbH.

For one thing, AI and ML can be used to help humans save time so they can have more time to do what they do best: be creative, he said during the conference session “Will Machines Take Over?” at the Innovation and Transformation Summit (ITS): Localisation event in London on Feb. 28.

Germany-based AppTek is a leader in AI and ML, providing human language technology and cognition solutions for the enterprise, and has been a pioneer in breakthrough research and development for automatic speech recognition (ASR), neural machine translation (NMT), natural language processing and understanding (NLP/U) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies.

“When I was preparing this presentation, I was actually a little bothered about the title because it’s so super catchy, I thought, ‘Do people have to think about?’” the Terminator films automatically, Steinbiss said at the ITS event.

“You should not keep this Terminator in mind. Think of a completely different movie. Has any one of you watched the movie Hidden Figures?”

He asked attendees who saw it to raise their arms and noted “quite a lot of people” did, adding Hidden Figures was a “more appropriate” movie to refer to when talking about computer advancements. It’s a story about three African American women who work in computing for NASA’s Mercury program in the 1960s, he pointed out.

He later pivoted to talk about the heavily touted ChatGPT. “I find that very interesting,” he said, noting there is “a lot of high-tech” involved, along with “money and energy” being put into it. “And that’s something everybody is watching very closely.”

ChatGPT is still “in a scientific area [in the sense that] even if people play with it … there is a lot of work still to be done but it’s certainly super impressive,” he said, adding: “Of course it has been built to be impressive because it’s about venture capital and this kind of thing, but it’s certainly nothing that should be, say, overlooked. So everybody’s looking into it and let’s see what we make out of it.”

For now, he said, “what we are basically doing is running control experiments” to see “how good it really is because when you have GPT-3, you might know that’s a machine that produces words.”

He added: “You start with the story and then it continues the story. That should be able to improve speech recognition and machine translation and natural language processing, and what we currently do is we check how much of an improvement is really there because there’s a lot of effort that goes into it. So we are pretty curious and let’s see what it brings. So I think the truth is it’s too early to really understand what it will bring. It’s certainly something everybody is going to watch very closely.”

But he is also “a little concerned regarding ChatGPT actually,” he said. “Google was much more prudent in releasing this. OpenAI basically gave people the chance to accept that machine and there is quite some ethical and … safety concerns together with that and it’s kind of unfortunate that when you want to attract the investment money that you are maybe not so prudent. I think it’s really something that has to be very carefully watched because if you have something that … just makes everything a hundred times faster or easier to build a bomb or whatever, it’s something you should be very careful about.”

He told attendees: “Ask me in a half a year” about ChatGPT. “I’m very excited but I’m also a little concerned.”

The Innovation and Transformation Summit: Localisation was sponsored by AppTek, Signiant, EIDR, Iyuno, LinQ Media Group, Vubiquity, OOONA, XL8, and Collot Baca, and was produced by MESA, in association with the Content Localisation Council.