AI SCIENTIST From Google sends WARNING to Muslims

we have officially entered the AI Revolution and in the last year alone we've seen exactly how powerful AI can be with viral AI language systems such as chat GPT being used to order entire essays complete School assignments and even prepare Friday Hardware or image generation software that can create realistic images and videos based on prompts from your wildest imagination Donald Trump as a Muslim thank you thank you very much or even create for you a virtual Studio and of course AI voice models that can be trained to replicate famous voices and mimic whatever sound you envision Kanye West singing the shed and the crazy part this technology is making Mammoth progressions by the day but what does this mean for us as Muslims should we be scared is this a sign of an approaching apocalyptic doomsday or is this something that will pass over us silently and soon wither away we sat down with one of the world's leading Muslim experts in AI Dr walidus no stranger to Silicon Valley and someone who is responsible for incorporating artificial intelligence into some of the world's biggest brands such as Google and Uber someone who is responsible for pioneering Google Maps we asked him all the difficult questions and this is what took place is there a transhuman agenda play a movement to merge humans and robots together yeah I mean before we jump to the interview which I'm sure you're waiting to hear if you enjoy this content and all the other content that onepass Network produces please support us to create more we are currently in the final stages of completing our studio to create bigger and better Productions to benefit Muslims around the world please consider going over to our website and continue attributing whatever you can to support our mission and now to the interview so you've been working with AI for decades we are often hearing now ai this AI that yeah what is artificial intelligence I mean how would you explain AI to a 10 year old child yeah so artificial intelligence historically how computers have been programmed is you tell them to do a and b and c and no matter what they experience or what things they see they don't change their behavior over time the essence of artificial intelligence is learning from experience in other words every time the algorithm or the computer sees a new example it's trying to work out what can this example teach me about the world throughout our lives we actually use AI a lot so for example when you finish watching a video on Netflix how does it decide what you should watch next the AI has been looking people who watched movie A always like movie b or they you know 50 percent of the much you know movie be and so in so doing you're actually starting to notice patterns in the world no longer is the computer saying being told exactly what to do but it's being told to adapt and modify and that idea of adaptation is really something that historically has been something that only humans do and now all of a sudden computers are becoming stronger at it as well given that AI at the moment can generate realistic images text video and speech how difficult is it to authenticate information is this something that we should be cautious about yeah I think it is and especially what we've seen for example in the United States with interference in elections by Russians trying to use these techniques imagine those techniques on steroids right because now you can personalize it for every person the the detectability is is difficult so it's something we definitely have to pay attention to and hopefully regulate how do you feel like this will cause um you know in terms of with spread of information and false news and things like that how can we combat this yeah it's a really difficult problem um and I think it's also because people have not yet learned you know to differentiate you know between artificial content and genuine content and the content is designed to press people's buttons and that leads to things like confirmation bias so really it's up to us to really check our sources and it's not like that this is an unislamic things you know in Allah says so Allah is telling us that when news comes to you make sure to take the time to verify that and and those forms of verification are getting more technically complicated but it's the same basic principles from your experience how far is AI from becoming sentient or conscious yeah well scientists have struggled to define consciousness for a long time and I don't think we have a good grip on it uh the Quran says yes I ask you about the soul or the essence of Consciousness they say that knowledge is from the matters of my Lord in other words this type of thing is still not something that people can answer there's also questions about whether the question is well formed one of the early computer science Pioneers said asking if machines can think is like asking if submarines can swim they're just so different that the question doesn't even make sense will AI replace our friends will people stop finding the need to get married and having people human relationships unfortunately I do foresee a change on that front uh in particular marriage rates are plummeting across Western societies birth rates are plummeting against across Western societies and the cause of that essentially is the rise of pornography on the internet now imagine that you take that as an example and this is only one of the social implications but imagine that but really amp it up to 11 where you can use AI to craft an identity that is very tailored to your personal preferences and you know what you find interesting whether that's through text or Voice or images and you can see that same unfortunate pattern of social damage um that happened with pornography but much Amplified and that's I think something that Society will have to deal with I think it's it's it's one of the concerns I do have for how AI will adversely affect the community and unfortunately we're already starting to see signs of that um Sam Altman the CEO of openai who created chat GPT has said that the technology May pose a risk of Extinction yeah as a someone who's experienced in Ai and as a Muslim how would you respond to that it it doesn't keep me awake at night is maybe the best way to put it if you look at the other causes of Extinction uh like climate change and just Society kind of falling apart and the family unit kind of being destroyed which is what we're seeing now this isn't the thing that gets me you know really worried the technology is still at its infancy um and Sam Altman has his own agenda so I've been in Silicon Valley for 15 years now and what you do is when you have a startup you want to build a motor around it you want to build barriers to entry to other people entering it and so what you do is you get the government to do your dirty work for you introduce regulations that you know how to meet that other people don't know how to meet and that's just how business is played so while I respect Sam Altman's technical technical abilities it's also very important to understand that he has an agenda here that he is trying to pursue and that's just what he's going to do as the CEO of open AI what are some potential uses of AI in the Islamic space that can actually contribute positively yeah um I think I've seen some very interesting applications I think one that really demonstrates the possibilities is tertil which is a mobile phone app that listens to you read Quran and tells you when you make a mistake you know historically this has taken you sitting down with someone or finding someone to be your buddy but this app makes it so much easier so it's like a general tool that can be used for almost any purposes the apps that can generate images can generate artistic images that encourage us to to kind of really reflect if they're in the right hands with the right prompts there are so many exciting possibilities here in terms of just every aspect of Islam so as an expert in AI do you trust the information that comes out from these Bots and programs no I don't I know that may sound counter-intuitive to people but I've spent a lot of time working with these Bots first hand and I know that they have a problem with what's called hallucination it's not just that they are ignorant which means that they don't know but they hallucinate they don't know that they don't know in other words they can make stuff up be a hundred percent confident that is correct and have actually completely they call that in Arabic well you don't know that you don't know yeah yeah so yes the big problem with AI is Right Nothing Stops it from making up a Hadith that doesn't exist for example and the current iterations of the technology have a problem called hallucination they just make things up so there are certain chatbots that if you ask them right now you know do I need to wash my knees as part of we'll tell you yes you have to wash your knees as part of we do and so sometimes they'll make things up and especially dangerous is they can be very confident that they're uh and wrong at the same time so they won't tell you I'm not sure they will just give you a confident answer so I think we have to um kind of be very cautious about using AI in the religious space I think there are uses um imagine you know right now searching Quran and Hadith is still very difficult because often we look for words but words don't capture meaning and one of the great things with these AI systems is that they capture meaning or what's called semantic information and that makes things like Hadith search and Quran search potentially much better and that could also be a very awesome tool for Scholars but Scholars have the wisdom to interpret and judge that so in the in the past decades we've seen the problem that we've had with Sheikh Google yeah how are we going to have the same problem with Chef AI yes I mean that's the short version of the answer I think we as a community need to develop our skill to differentiate and understand these Technologies well enough to understand their limitations uh I think we think that they are somehow magical and they they must be talking truth and ignore you know the historical biases that have existed um in things like search results and so this has led to kind of all kinds of polarization in society and I think that there is a risk with these technologies that you could have that same kind of polarization effect if they are not used appropriately so I think there is definitely the room for that to happen um I mean there's always this challenge with the Muslim Community you can either say that what they're doing is wrong or you can adapt to whatever they're doing and make it better you know do you say that no no you should never search the internet for Islamic information which is one approach or do you actually say well why don't we work on tools that make it better and more effective and more authentic and more consistent to search the internet for answers and that's really the perspective I would like to take how biased are some of these AI chat Bots I asked check GPT when it first came out to explain the Palestinian conflict to a 10 year old and he gave me some sort of response saying that it's a very complex difficult thing to sort of explain what are some of the dangers with this particular bias yeah so bias is a very real thing right the these systems are not kind of made mysteriously right like there are humans who make their systems and there's two things to think about one is the the piece of software that they write the algorithms right and then the other thing is that the data that they use to build um the models the models are the things that do the thinking if you like so imagine a programmer is sitting there in California he has probably a western liberal bias he's not even aware of the bias because that's one of the challenges with bias and he's making choices about how the algorithm works and the data that they're using to train the algorithm and goes oh this is good data this is bad data even if he doesn't mean to introduce bias bias is going to make its way in and this is something that has been comprehensively proven um and especially the the work of timnit Gabriel who used to work at Google and then when she published papers in this area got fired um really demonstrates that this bias is a real thing the good news is there are ways to reduce the bias um so you can either change the data that you use to train the model or in some cases you can change the personality of the software that comes and says please I want you to adopt an Islamic personality and Islamic mindset and in my own experiments that's something that's actually worked surprisingly well we've seen the impact of social media on our attention spans yeah and given that AI has the ability to write up our assignments and make some of the thinking tasks a lot quicker yeah will this make us a lazy or a dumb Society oh that's a very very tricky question every time a new major technology was introduced people had concerns that it was going to cause the destruction of humanity so even when published books when printing presses came out people were like this is going to damage people's memory and it's going to make everything worse and no one will remember anything but now we see that the net impact of books has been positive having said that you have to ask the question has this gone too far are we now living in such a society of of ease that it affects our value judgments right so when knowledge was hard to obtain and when it was hard to learn about Islamic knowledge we seem to have respected it more they used to travel for months to get one Hadith exactly and now we live in an age where you can get every Hadith in 10 seconds every Hadith ever written ever ever documented in 10 seconds but it hasn't really made us like better Muslims right because there's a difference between knowledge and wisdom and that's my concern with this technology as well sometimes when you make things easier and more accessible you devalue them in the process and that's really my fear is there a transhuman agenda play you know a movement to merge humans and robots together yeah I mean there are people who have that view within the community and talk a lot about things like the singularity you know when we'll come together and there'll be a new species homo roboticus or something like that we're not really seeing things going in that direction um and you know there's always going to be people on the margins who have crazy ideas but I don't think this is something that I've seen like a conspiracy happening in Silicon view you know to emerge humans and robots together could the advancements of artificial intelligence possibly casted out on the awe-inspiring nature of Allah's creation not for me certainly not um if anything it's the opposite and you know all of these machines all of these you know crazy algorithms we still can't you know there's a verse in the Quran that talks about Humanity creating a fly we haven't even managed to create a fly so I mean the thought that this is gonna somehow affect our Iman because we've kind of glued together lots of information at the internet and made like a little you know they call them stochastic parrots random parrots you know like think of these things as like lots of monkeys that have been trained on the internet as if that reflects something and a change in our faith that was that seems Preposterous to me given that AI has the capability of replicating human voice matching visuals or even bringing back to Virtual life someone who's passed away is AI playing the role of God you'll notice that there's something common to all of these patterns which is all of these algorithms they need something to get them started so even if you want to create someone who's alive after they were dead you need like every email they've ever sent or every phone call that they've ever made all these things are doing is just replicating things that Allah had I remember Muhammad Sharif used to tell the story of you know scientists who said you know what we can now create like a tiny little insect and they have a discussion with God and and God says well then go get your own dirt and elements that you use to make the insect all this is doing is clever reassembly uh if anything it just lets us wonder about like how Allah did this in the first place how can a Muslim ensure that AI does not ruin their relationship with Allah yeah that's a very very deep question um it definitely has the potential to you could use AIS to educate you about Islam you could use it to build really great Darwin material but you can also use it to build machines that kill people machines that do other disastrous things that spam people and cause facade in the land and so on so it's really up to us to use the benefits of AI to help us grow better and you know in much the same way that having access to books is neither good nor bad it just really depends on like your focus and your choice you can make choices in how you use AI for example to summarize Islamic books you can use it for your Spiritual Development just as much and it can benefit in that way too you've worked on developments such as Google Maps and Uber both of which are technologies that have changed people's lives where do you see AI you know taking taking Humanity forward within the five next five to ten years yeah wow that's a really really tricky question all of these Technologies what they're going to do is amplify the trends that exists already in society and the evil will become worse and the good will become better and it's really up to us to make sure that that will that will go in the positive direction I foresee a world where education and learning about the world is going to be much accelerated I can see a world where people feel more productive and fulfilled at work because of the menial tasks that they work uh involves have been automated but I can also see a world of more unemployment and more inequity in society where the poor get poorer and the rich get richer and that's where we as Muslims have to be part of this discussion to ensure that the right things happen in society that Society moves in the direction of positivity of utility for the community as a whole and do you think Muslims should embrace AI or should they stand and wait back and find out what happens the the lessons of history and Islam to me are that it's been a bad idea for us to stay back and really we want people at the Forefront of these skills so I think about you know when the printing press was introduced originally many scholars oppose the printing press because it was um it was seen as uh destructive to knowledge and and putting these hands of people the same thing if you remember back to the internet or satellite television Muslims were originally opposed only to later Embrace these Technologies and start to use them and miss out on the benefit of all those years when they said that they were not really very useful so I think if we have people who have the right mentality who can take the time to understand this technology we have the opportunity here to direct this technology in a way that we think could bring about more social good and less social harm and I I don't think we can stick our heads in the Sands if we don't have Islamic alternatives for people people are just going to go use chat jpt or whatever else so it's really important for us to be part of this narrative from the beginning and that's become a driving factor for me personally investing in this space because it is going to be an agent of social change and I'd rather have it play out for us than against us discussion absolutely it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you today

Channel: OnePath Network

Views: 921,083

Keywords: Muslim, Islam, muhammad, quran, mohammad, sunnah, religion, mohamed, Allah, onepath, onepath network, ummah, islamic reminder, islamic lecture, Dawah, artificial intelligence, ai expert, waleed kaddous, ai islam, ai muslim

Id: u7k8j0q-Eag

Length: 20min 42sec (1242 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023