[INSPRATIONAL MUSIC STING] - All right, folks, everything we wanted, needed to know, didn't know where to ask about AI, artificial intelligence.

Dr. David Bader, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology, one of our higher ed partners.

Doctor, good to see you.

- Good to see you too, Steve, I'd love to talk about AI.

- Good, 30 seconds or less, what the heck is it?

- AI is a fantastic tool that can learn a lot from data and then be able to help us by using that data to improve our lives.

- Okay, got it, you got a bunch of people around here in our production team freaking out, asking the question, "Am I going to lose my job to AI?"

How do you talk to those folks?

Including, by the way, I'm worried about myself too, go ahead.

- You're not replaceable, Steve, so you have nothing to worry about.

- Good.

- But AI certainly is going to change the workforce, many of the introductory level jobs that we have are where we can learn and repeat that process, maybe AI will assist those folks.

We already see that happening in a number of sectors from driving cars to writing and places where it is really a repeatable task.

But, otherwise, I think in much of the workforce, AI will be an assistive technology.

AI is going to help us write better, it's going to help us reason better, and it's really exciting to be able to use that in day-to-day practice.

- You know, Doctor, I appreciate everything you're saying, but there are some involved in the business of AI who have said publicly in testimony, before Congress, there'll be a whole range of hearings as we move forward because Congress and the Government is trying to figure out their role in all this, there are those in the AI industry or people involved in AI who say, "You know what?

We're worried, we're concerned about the parameters of AI, the limits of AI, the regulation of AI, and frankly, the potential dangers, please talk about it.

- That's a fantastic conversation to have.

And I think because AI is being developed at such an accelerated pace, we've seen changes in the last six months that we haven't seen in the course of humanity that there is some concern to think about it and to make sure that it's regulated properly.

And I think those discussions will take place.

It may be for the next year or two years where we figure out, how do we have more responsible AI?

How is it used correctly?

How does society as a whole talk about AI and accept its uses?

So it is a conversation that's very important but I'm optimistic that those will be errors that will be worked out in (garbled).

- Finish your point, I'm sorry, 'cause I'm about to ask you about elections and misinformation, so go ahead.

- So with AI, again, it was just six months ago that ChatGPT dropped and had over a hundred million users in it its first month, testing out this new generative AI.

And so, that conversation is just starting around the country and around the world as to how we want to use these new tools that we have.

Of course, like anything that's new, we have to figure out, what are the boundaries on it?

How can we use this in a responsible fashion?

What do we have to understand about the risks whether it's used in a courtroom, whether it's used in medicine, whether it's used in education?

So we have to understand those things, and like any new technology, time will help work out those details.

- So let me lay this out for you, and I need your reaction to it.

So the graphic will come up on the screen right now for a series we've been doing for years called "Democracy at a Crossroads" for a lot of reasons.

But now, let's talk about elections, information, credible, legitimate information to voters before they vote, and AI.

If AI, if artificial intelligence has the ability to have Joe Biden or Donald Trump or anyone else running for major office to not actually use a quote from them directly, but put a 30 second spot together on broadcast and a whole range of social media, digital platforms, in which it manufactures what that person said or did and puts it out as information for voters to decide before they vote, but it's false, it's been manufactured through AI, it's misinformation, how the heck do we manage that?

- That is a real threat, and I agree with you, that's one of the biggest concerns that we have with upholding our democracy and understanding information and disinformation.

There are many bad actors out there who are working on that right now that that's happened in the past, and I think AI enables that to happen at an even greater rate going into the future.

So we have to combat that.

I think that takes some work in cybersecurity.

For instance, what we do at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the great universities around the state of New Jersey are working on ways to detect, to combat it, and also to prevent that type of disinformation from spreading.

So humans naturally believe video in ways that it is more natural than, say, printed text.

And so, when you see a video, it's very natural to believe that it's real.

And this generative AI, as you mentioned, can generate real voices, real imagery that is nearly impossible to detect from the original.

But since it's generated, we do have algorithms that are able to understand that it is a fabricated image and to be able to detect and and flag that.

But it's gonna take a lot of hard work.

Both sides are going to escalate and we'll have to get better and better at preventing that disinformation.

- Let me ask you this because a lot of what you're saying leads me to this question.

I'm a student of leadership, we do a sister program with my colleague, Mary Gamba, called "Lessons in Leadership", and I've been researching, thinking about and have to write about in the near future the subject of artificial intelligence and leadership, meaning, what does AI mean for the leaders of today and tomorrow?

What do you believe it means to those of us in leadership positions, particularly those of us who wanna be better at this leadership game?

- AI offers this fantastic ability to learn what information is important, for instance, to understand best practices, to understand areas that we may not have had expertise in previously.

So as a leader, we may want to understand a current issue or particular topic.

And I think that's where AI really shines to be able to help inform, to be able to help provide information in a way that's targeted not to the masses but to target you individually, to a way that you like to get that information as well.

So AI really has the ability to impact individuals, to be personalized, and to really give you a capability of understanding to augment your memory, to augment your knowledge in ways that haven't been seen before.

So I'm very optimistic with leadership, we'll see benefits to having AI all around us in all of the actions that we take to understand policies, to understand impacts of decisions and so on.

- This is the first of many conversations we're gonna have about artificial intelligence.

One of those conversations will also be about AI and income disparities, and the fact that different people have different access to technology in certain forms.

Dr. David Bader, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at NJIT, one of our higher ed partners.

Dr. Bader, thank you so much for joining us.

- Great to talk with you, Steve.

- I'm Steve Adubato, we gotta learn more about AI, see you next time.

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