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VATICAN CITY Political leaders have a responsibility to create the conditions necessary for artificial intelligence to be at the service of humanity and to help mitigate its risks, Pope Francis told world leaders.

We cannot allow a tool as powerful and indispensable as artificial intelligence to reinforce such a (technocratic) paradigm, but rather, we must make artificial intelligence a bulwark against the threat, he said in his address June 14 at the Group of Seven summit being held in southern Italy.

This is precisely where political action is urgently needed, he said.

Many people believe politics is a distasteful word, often due to the mistakes, corruption and inefficiency of some politicians not all of them, some. There are also attempts to discredit politics, to replace it with economics or to twist it to one ideology or another, he said.

But the world cannot function without healthy politics, the pope said, and effective progress toward universal fraternity and social peace requires a sound political life.

The pope addressed leaders at the G7s special outreach session dedicated to artificial intelligence. In addition to the G7 members the United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain the forum included specially invited heads of state, including the leaders of Argentina, India and Brazil.

The G7 summit was being held in Borgo Egnazia in Puglia June 13-15 to discuss a series of global issues, such as migration, climate change and development in Africa, and the situation in the Middle East and Ukraine. The pope was scheduled to meet privately with 10 heads of state and global leaders in bilateral meetings before and after his talk, including U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Because of time limits set for speakers during the outreach session, the pope read only a portion of his five-page speech, although the full text was made part of the official record. The Vatican provided a copy of the full text.

In his speech, the pope called artificial intelligence an exciting and fearsome tool. It could be used to expand access to knowledge to everyone, to advance scientific research rapidly and to give demanding and arduous work to machines.

Yet at the same time, it could bring with it a greater injustice between advanced and developing nations or between dominant and oppressed social classes, raising the dangerous possibility that a throwaway culture be preferred to a culture of encounter,' he said.

Like every tool and technology, he said, the benefits or harm it will bring will depend on its use.

While he called for the global community to find shared principles for a more ethical use of AI, Pope Francis also called for an outright ban of certain applications.

For example, he repeated his insistence that so-called lethal autonomous weapons be banned, saying no machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.

Decision-making must always be left to the human person, he said. Human dignity itself depends on there being proper human control over the choices made by artificial intelligence programs.

Humanity would be condemned to a future without hope if we took away peoples ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives, by dooming them to depend on the choices of machines, he said. In his text, he specifically criticized judges using AI with prisoners personal data, such as their ethnicity, background, education, psychological assessments and credit rating, to determine whether the prisoner is likely to re-offend upon release and therefore require home-confinement.

The pope also cautioned, students especially, against generative artificial intelligence, which are magnificent tools and easily make available online applications for composing a text or producing an image on any theme or subject.

However, he said, these tools are not generative, in that they do not develop new analyses or concepts; they are merely reinforcing as they can only repeat what they find, giving it an appealing form and without checking whether it contains errors or preconceptions.

Generative AI not only runs the risk of legitimizing fake news and strengthening a dominant cultures advantage, but, in short, it also undermines the educational process itself, his text said.

It is precisely the ethos concerning the understanding of the value and dignity of the human person that is most at risk in the implementation and development of these systems, he told the leaders. Indeed, we must remember that no innovation is neutral.

Technology impacts social relations in some way and represents some kind of arrangement of power, thus enabling certain people to perform specific actions while preventing others from performing different ones, he said. In a more or less explicit way, this constitutive power dimension of technology always includes the worldview of those who invented and developed it.

In order for artificial intelligence programs to be tools that build up the good and create a better tomorrow, he said, they must always be aimed at the good of every human being, and they must have an ethical inspiration, underlining his support of the Rome Call for AI Ethics launched in 2020.

It is up to everyone to make good use of artificial intelligence, he said, but the onus is on politics to create the conditions for such good use to be possible and fruitful.

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World leaders discussing global issues at three-day G7 summit, including Pope Francis on artificial intelligence - The Dialog

June 5, 2024 Nano-X Imaging, an innovative medical imaging technology company, today announced that its deep-learning medical imaging analytics subsidiary, Nanox AI Ltd., has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) functionality in the Second Opinions online medical consultation service. Second Opinions is a platform provided by USARAD Holdings INC, a subsidiary of Nano-X Imaging Ltd., that provides teleradiology services. The platform connects patients with radiologists and other subspecialty physicians for additional consultation on their medical diagnoses. Second Opinions has integrated three ofNanox.AIs FDA 510(k)-cleared AI solutions, enabling patients to conveniently get second opinions from experts in various medical and surgical subspecialties including radiology, neurology, oncology and orthopedic surgery. The integration ofNanox.AIs tools is intended to promote the early detection of chronic conditions on chest and abdominal CT scans:

These AI-driven insights are reviewed and approved by Second Opinions physicians and incorporated into reports for patients who submit eligible chest and abdominal CT scans.

We are excited to bring AI-powered, early detection through the Second Opinions platform to patients seeking peace of mind concerning their health and diagnoses, said Erez Meltzer, Nanox Chief Executive Officer. The integration ofNanox.AIs solutions into the Second Opinions service will help empower radiologists and other healthcare providers by providing them with advanced AI tools that aim to improve patient outcomes. We will continue exploring opportunities to leverage our AI technology to promote accessible early diagnosis and preventative management.

Learn more about Second Opinions and its new AI capabilities atArtificial Intelligence (AI) Service - Second Opinions.

For more information:www.nanox.vision

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Nanox Launches Artificial Intelligence Functionality in Second Opinions Platform - Imaging Technology News

Technology investment is having a nearly immediate impact on the bottom line, but when it comes to the most transformative technology todayartificial intelligencethe real investment isnt happening.

That is the conclusion of research firm Zero100, which concluded that while most businesses are interested in AI and are rapidly investing in AI, most have not moved past the pilot stage at this point.

AI is fundamentally changing the landscape of supply chain managementand its happening at a faster rate than weve seen before, said Kevin OMarah, chief research officer and co-founder of Zero100. Its the biggest tech inflection point since the internet and, while AI experiments have been ongoing, the rise of generative AI is pushing digitization to the forefront. Boards recognize that the ability to digitize and embrace AI will be the difference between prosperity and decline over the next decade. They now need a clear path forward to capitalize on this opportunity.

Despite this, though, Zero100s analysis of public earnings calls has found few successes to tout. According to the firms research, only 11% of companies have deployed AI beyond the pilot stage, and while 88% of CEOs spoke of their companys AI vision, only one in four was able to cite the results of an AI project.

When it comes to supply chain technology investment generally, the cloud-based integration platform Cleo found that an overwhelming majority of companies saw benefits from the deployment within 24 months.

The report,Cleos 2024 Ecosystem Integration Global Market Report,found that 97% of companies surveyed had invested in supply chain technologies in 2023 and 35% stated that investment led to increased benefits. A full 81% said that supply chain technology investments delivered business improvements within 24 months generally, and 80% indicated they saw increased revenue in the same year the investment was made.

A companys supply chain is simply a series of commitments that tether across an ecosystem and must be delivered upon,Tushar Patel, CMO at Cleo, said in a release. And for companies to uphold those critical business commitments, they need to consistently invest in their supply chain technology, otherwise they stand to take a hit to their relationshipsimpacting their bottom line.

But investment in AI seems to be taking a bit longer. Zero100 recommends companies employ a 90-day AI fast track plan. The plan creates three separate 90-day attack plans to accelerate digital adoption. It is:

According toresearch from Gartner, top-performing supply chains are investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning at twice the rate of their lower-performing peers. Those same firms are also able to leverage their size to utilize productivity as a focal point for sustaining business momentum over the next three years. Conversely, lower-performing companies are more likely to utilize efficiency or cost savings.

"Top-performing supply chain organizations make investment decisions with a different lens than their lower-performing peers," saidKen Chadwick, VP analyst inGartner's Supply Chain Practice. "Enhancing productivity is the key factor that will drive future success and the key to unlocking that productivity lies in leveraging intangible assets. We see this divide especially in the digital domain where the best organizations are far ahead in optimizing their supply chain data with AI/ML applications to unlock value."

Gartner surveyed 818 supply chain practitioners across geography and industry from August through October 2023. Organizations were scored across five key metrics measuring business and people outcomes to determine their performance level. High performers were defined as those organizations that exceeded expectations over the past 12 months across the five measurements.

When it comes to the processes using AI/ML, 40% of high performers are using AI/ML in demand forecasting, versus just 19% of low performers.

See the article here:
Is AI ready for takeoff? Analysis finds only 11% of firms have gone beyond - SCMR

By Hub staff report

Nearly half the world's population are expected to vote in 2024 as more than 60 countries around the globe hold elections. Looming over those votes is the potential use of artificial intelligence to disrupt campaigns and elections.

Scott Warren, a visiting fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund (GMF), recently attended a convening of global election officials held in Brussels. There, he heard about their efforts to prepare for an AI-fueled election season.

Image caption: Scott Warren

Last year, Warren and the SNF Agora Institute partnered with the R Street Institute to develop a set of conservative principles for building trust in elections, and he notes the use of artificial intelligence has come up in those conversations as well.

The big issue folks are talking about, obviously, is misinformation or disinformation. There are two big things to think about.

One, some of the bigger threats in terms of misinformation or disinformation are not necessarily the ones everybody is talking aboutsuch as deep fakes of Trump or fake news articles. Some of it, and Arizona Secretary State Adrian Fontes demonstrated this at the Brussels forum, is lower-profile election officials being used for deep fakes.

The public is getting a bit more used to the idea of a deep fake with Biden, Trump, or a national official. But with people who aren't as well-known but profess to have expertise in electionsthat is a specific area ripe for disinformation.

AI offers a number of opportunities and solutions for providing more information to people about how to participate in where to vote. We can also use it to clean up voter rolls. But I think election officials are still very much at the early stages of what can be done.

AI will use social media it's just more sophisticated and can happen at a broader scale. When you're using social media, you had to create online trolls, and they weren't necessarily sophisticated.

With AI, there's going to be a lot more opportunity to use deep fakes and create false personas. Four years ago, there wasn't a path to do that. In 2015, there was an article on Facebook claiming the Pope endorsed Trump that was widely shared. With AI, you can now make a video of the Pope endorsing Trump. It's a similar type of information, but a more advanced way of getting it across.

People are talking about this threat much earlier than they were with social media. There's bipartisan support for trying to figure this out early.

And I think there are some efficiencies with elections that AI will be able to solve for. If it's used well and targeted in the right way, it can provide a lot more information to people about where and when to vote.

We're getting in front of this very early, and there's opportunity for people to harness it in positive ways.

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How election experts are thinking about AI and its impact on the 2024 elections - The Hub at Johns Hopkins

Takako Aikawa and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology team spent three years building an AI tutor to help students with Japanese writing skills. They halted the project in 2020 during the pandemic, but their goal got an unexpected boost two years later when OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

ChatGPT just did everything that we wanted to do, said Aikawa, a senior lecturer in Japanese at MIT and project lead. It was sad; we spent a lot of hours and many years of work on it, but it was also happy because it just did everything we wanted to do.

Aikawa and many foreign language professors across the nation view the emergenceand constant reiterationsof generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools as possible launch pads for their subjects, boosting interest from students, improving skills earlier on and advancing the evolution of foreign language learning.

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The hope comes despite recent cuts in the field, notably from West Virginia University, which last summer cut foreign language majors and most courses. This May, the Department of Defense also cut funding to more than a third of its 31 language programs.

Jen William, Purdue Universitys head of the school of languages and cultures, was initially skeptical when ChatGPT burst onto the scene in Nov. 2022.

I was wary for sure; of course, with language courses were always concerned about enrollment, she said. My fear was that upper administrators especially would take this moment to capitalize on the fact that now we have an excuse to cut more language courses because all the students now have this tool at their disposal.

But many foreign language professors see AI as an opportunity amid a difficult time.

The path foreign language is on is a path toward extinction, said Andrew Piper, professor of languages, literatures and cultures at Canadas McGill University. I tend to be cautious about using overblown language, but it is a disaster. My take is: Its a broken system and by itself it needs reworking. I would love for [AI] to be a wakeup call. Whether it transpires that way remains to be seen.

AI tools, especially ChatGPTs newest version called GPT4-o, can help students not just with writing, but with speakingmaking them on-demand tutors.

The one-on-one is a huge advantage, because the biggest hurdle is classroom participation, Piper said. You do a lot of group work and its all about production. So we do what we can to amp up participating but we know theres a ton of compromise happening.

Institutions have begun tinkering with possibilities.

Arizona State University is creating language buddies within its OpenAI partnership, allowing university students to practice conversations with an AI bot at their own level.

Students in Purdues introductory level Spanish courses use an AI platform of their choice as a tool when writing essays. Purdue also hired computational linguists to further study AI and language.

Its not just pulling out a calculator in a math class, but its something that has to be intentionally coordinated and a guided tool, William said. Those professors can do it because theyre trained in AI but it will take some time to develop the skills. But Im seeing more and more of the potential.

Kevin Gaugler, assistant dean of the school of liberal arts and a Spanish professor at Marist College, said he believes the technology will bring a recalibration to language studies, rather than a demisemuch like the rest of higher education that is re-thinking assessments and processes in light of AI.

This isnt unique to languages; because this is a technology that goes after human knowledge, every discipline will have to re-evaluate and recalibrate our curriculum to teach the competencies thatll be more valued moving forward, Gaugler said.

That puts a burden on educators to shift our curriculum to be sensitive to that, he said. You cant have introductory courses that rely on transactional things like reading menus or hailing cabs, because people can read their phones and do that.

However, even with AIs usage soaring among students, that recalibration will take time, training and evolving methods.

Its still going to be homework; it wont suddenly make people say, I just cant stop talking to my French tutor, Piper said. Its still a tutor at the end of the day, even if its a robot.

Experts emphasize that teaching language courses is about more than grammar and vocabulary. Instead, there is a focus on cultural competencies, cultural empathy and communication.

Weve spent decades getting away from the idea foreign language courses are making people fluent, William said. Its not about making sure to conjugate a verb [students] can look up any time. Its more about seeing another culture through another lens.

Some of those skills come into play later, in higher level courses, such as Pipers German Language, Media and Culture course at McGill. While many students who enter universities take introductory foreign language courses, most of them go no further.

Piper said AIs capabilities could help with basic material, such as vocabulary, and help students get to more advanced courses faster.

It could introduce them [to the language] earlier, so theyre fluent, then can take higher-level courses, he said. Its hard to teach German literature if your German is subpar.

Paula Krebs, executive director at the Modern Language Association, agreed, pointing toward AIs capabilities in coding languages that could help give computer scientists a leg up.

We know how flexible weve had to be in the past and will continue to be, she said. When calculators came out math professors were not quitting their jobs. Computer science courses wont go away with AI even though they can code; students will just start from the next step up.

There are downsides with the technologyChatGPT and many other generative AI tools largely train on English text, a factor that brings its own biases. Lesser known languages have a smaller digital footprint, according to Gaugler. For example, across the 137 Hawaiian islands, there are at least 130 languages, many of which have never been put in a written form.

There are some efforts being takenMeta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagramhas a No Language Left Behind promise to ensure inclusion within AI translations.

There are also a number of language nuances, idioms and cultural contexts that humans, not machines, have to teach.

AI can only take you so far, Gaugler said. I dont think it can help you propose to someone, or seal the deal on the business transaction without understanding the culture and other language nuances.

He said that even if we reach the Star Trek moment with a universal translator, theres going to be value in not speaking through a machine.

Generative AI also does not take into consideration the training teachers undergo to help students learn difficult content. Krebs said AI does not add the literal human element needed.

I just cant see that AI itself could be valuable for language learning without the kind of human interaction and cultural context that makes language, language, she said.

Krebs said the MLA is conducting its next round of research into investigating foreign language course enrollment. A recent report based on 2021 data found that foreign language enrollment courses saw the steepest decline on record, falling more than 16percent over five years.

But its not just student disinterest, Krebs said, noting the impact of higher education enrollment dropping overall and the large institutional cuts at places like WVU and the Department of Defense. She also said many institutions do not include foreign language in their data since most students do not take it as a sole major.

Piper believes the cuts are due to high costs, in that foreign language courses have to be kept small (20 to 30 students, in his universitys case) while other courses, such as Intro to Chemistry, can have 100-plus-person lectures.

The MLA is now working on an ad hoc committee to fine tune regulations and best practices when it comes to deploying AI. The organization spent the last few years focusing on computational English courses, but after the first year, realized foreign language needed a standalone focus.

We realize weve got to put together a more integrated approach to this, Krebs said. Because every time I turn around someone is saying to me, Whats going to happen to foreign language education with AI? Im tired of having to say, Sentence for sentence [AI translation] does not do the job of language education. It is not the same thing.

Originally posted here:
AI adds hope and concern to foreign language learning - Inside Higher Ed