Artificial intelligence must be “bold and responsible”. It is this leitmotif that shaped yesterday’s opening speech at Google I/O. And in the role of the adventurous visionary but aware of his burden, James Manyika, the Mountain View giant’s head of technology and society, had the opportunity to speak about the dangers and obligations of Google.
He was also the one who introduced the Universal Translator. A tool that looks like a revolution or a Pandora’s box in a world full of fake news and deep fakes. As part of the example presented, it is indeed possible, from a video recorded in English, in this case a lesson, to transcribe the content of the video and then translate it. Nothing extraordinary so far. It then reproduces the speaker’s intonation and applies it to a synthetic voice in another language, such as Spanish, for demonstration. That’s impressive, but not necessarily worrying in and of itself. In the next step it gets complicated.
In fact, Universal Translator ensures that the lip movements of the original speaker, that is, the one who was filmed in the video, are synchronized, so that he gives the impression that he has spoken the message in the target language … The cases are applications Whether in education or plentiful in business, but this new barrier being removed between the real and the altered reality clearly shows that there is potential for problems and abuse, even if everything is not yet technically optimal.
Google – The various steps that characterize the operation of Universal Translator
Google – The various steps that characterize the operation of Universal TranslatorJames Manyika spoke of “the tension between boldness and responsibility”. That’s why he announced from the start that the service would not only be completely experimental, but would also not be accessible to everyone, but only to selected partners.
We can also hope that the development of this project will be subject to the Caudin Forks of the seven AI rules Google enacted in 2018.
- be socially beneficial
- Avoid creating or reinforcing prejudice
- Be careful when developing and testing for security
- Be accountable to users
- Integrate privacy policies
- Maintain exacting standards of academic excellence
- Be made available for uses that comply with these principles.
The same principles of AI that James Maniyka recalled minutes later help the giant “decide what not to do.” It was those principles that stopped Google from getting into general facial recognition APIs years ago, he explained, because “the guarantees back then weren’t good enough.” The same principles that stopped Google from using the start button before OpenAi for a ChatGPT equivalent to press? Perhaps. One of the solutions, for James Maniyka, is “to embrace the challenges that arise when they arise” through innovation and respect for a certain ethic that would almost sound like “don’t be evil”.
Anyway, in the shadow of these principles, Google would have developed its Universal Translator with security measures to avoid dangerous uses. Furthermore, the videos thus processed should be subject to the precautionary measures announced by James Manyika. Therefore, Google should soon “integrate new watermark innovations”. [ses] latest generative models to protect against misinformation”.
If it’s difficult to know exactly what all these preventive measures will consist of, and if, of course, Google says it wants to control the use of its technology, one must keep an eye on the leak of Meta’s AI model at the beginning of last spring . . A leak that, on the one hand, opened the door to abuse, but, on the other hand, also served as an accelerator for the cause thanks to the world of open source that exploited it. Evil and good, one more time. Google is aware of this and is trying to act beforehand to protect itself and prevent the worst, in a context where it seems impossible to impose a moratorium in an area that is changing rapidly and driven by geostrategic capital problems is charged. Ultimately, we always walk the fine line between boldness and responsibility. And so Universal Translator offers everything from Pandora’s box. Let’s not forget that hope always hides at the bottom of this mythical chest.