Artificial Intelligence In Indian Healthcare System: ICMR Releases First Ethical Guidelines The fresh guidelines are designed for all parties interested in researching AI in healthcare.

In a major development in the healthcare system in India, the Department of Health Research and ICMR's Artificial Intelligence Cell have released the first-ever ethical guidelines for applying artificial intelligence in biomedical research and healthcare structure in the country. India has just over 64 doctors available per 100,000 people compared to a global average of approximately 150 per 100,000 approx. According to the officials, these fresh guidelines for AI in the Indian healthcare system will help in the proper establishment of an ethical framework for the development of AI-based tools that can benefit all stakeholders. How does AI work in the healthcare system? Let's understand.

Currently, the AI in health sector relies heavily on the data which is being given or provided by human participants. This leaves a chance for loopholes, as there can be a gap in the data handling, interpretation, autonomy, risk minimization, professional competence, data sharing, and confidentiality, according to a document drafted by the two organizations. In the new ethical guideline, the ICMR has made it compulsory to have an ethical framework that addresses issues specific to AI for biomedical research and healthcare.

AI in the health sector in India is booming, however, there are a lot of potential ethical challenges which include algorithmic transparency and explainability, clarity on liability, accountability and oversight, bias and discrimination. In the current guideline, the ICMR has addressed these issues. Speaking to the media about the freshly released guidelines, Dr N K Arora, head of NTAGI, said, "The DHR-ICMR AI Cell has identified the need to develop these guiding ethical principles concerning artificial intelligence and machine learning-based tools."

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A third of Australian companies rely on artificial intelligence to help them hire the right person. But studies show its not always a benign intermediary

Sun 26 Mar 2023 10.00 EDT

Michael Scott, the protagonist from the US version of The Office, is using an AI recruiter to hire a receptionist.

Guardian Australia applies.

The text-based system asks applicants five questions that delve into how they responded to past work situations, including dealing with difficult colleagues and juggling competing work demands.

Potential employees type their answers into a chat-style program that resembles a responsive help desk. The real and unnerving power of AI then kicks in, sending a score and traits profile to the employer, and a personality report to the applicant. (More on our results later.)

This demonstration, by the Melbourne-based startup Sapia.ai, resembles the initial structured interview process used by their clients, who include some of Australias biggest companies such as Qantas, Medibank, Suncorp and Woolworths.

The process would typically create a shortlist an employer can follow up on, with insights on personality markers including humility, extraversion and conscientiousness.

For customer service roles, it is designed to help an employer know whether someone is amiable. For a manual role, an employer might want to know whether an applicant will turn up on time.

You basically interview the world; everybody gets an interview, says Sapias founder and chief executive, Barb Hyman.

The selling points of AI hiring are clear: it can automate costly and time-consuming processes for businesses and government agencies, especially in large recruitment drives for non-managerial roles.

Sapias biggest claim, however, might be that it is the only way to give someone a fair interview.

The only way to remove bias in hiring is to not use people right at the first gate, Hyman says. Thats where our technology comes in: its blind; its untimed, it doesnt use rsum data or your social media data or demographic data. All it is using is the text results.

Sapia is not the only AI company claiming its technology will reduce bias in the hiring process. A host of companies around Australia are offering AI-augmented recruitment tools, including not just chat-based models but also one-way video interviews, automated reference checks, social media analysers and more.

In 2022 a survey of Australian public sector agencies found at least a quarter had used AI-assisted tech in recruitment that year. Separate research from the Diversity Council of Australia and Monash University suggests that a third of Australian organisations are using it at some point in the hiring process.

Applicants, though, are often not aware that they will be subjected to an automated process, or on what basis they will be assessed within that.

The office of the Merit Protection Commissioner advises public service agencies that when they use AI tools for recruitment, there should be a clear demonstrated connection between the candidates qualities being assessed and the qualities required to perform the duties of the job.

The commissioners office also cautions that AI may assess candidates on something other than merit, raise ethical and legal concerns about transparency and data bias, produce biased results or cause statistical bias by erroneously interpreting socioeconomic markers as indicative of success.

Theres good reason for that warning. AIs track record on bias has been worrying.

In 2017 Amazon quietly scrapped an experimental candidate-ranking tool that had been trained on CVs from the mostly male tech industry, effectively teaching itself that male candidates were preferable. The tool systematically downgraded womens CVs, penalising those that included phrases such as womens chess club captain, and elevating those that used verbs more commonly found on male engineers CVs, such as executed and captured.

Research out of the US in 2020 demonstrated that facial-analysis technology created by Microsoft and IBM, among others, performed better on lighter-skinned subjects and men, with darker-skinned females most often misgendered by the programs.

Last year a study out of Cambridge University showed that AI is not a benign intermediary but that by constructing associations between words and peoples bodies it helps to produce the ideal candidate rather than merely observing or identifying it.

Natalie Sheard, a lawyer and PhD candidate at La Trobe University whose doctorate examines the regulation of and discrimination in AI-based hiring systems, says this lack of transparency is a huge problem for equity.

Messenger-style apps are based on natural language processing, similar to ChatGPT, so the training data for those systems tends to be the words or vocal sounds of people who speak standard English, Sheard says.

So if youre a non-native speaker, how does it deal with you? It might say you dont have good communication skills if you dont use standard English grammar, or you might have different cultural traits that the system might not recognise because it was trained on native speakers.

Another concern is how physical disability is accounted for in something like a chat or video interview. And with the lack of transparency around whether assessments are being made with AI and on what basis, its often impossible for candidates to know that they may need reasonable adjustments to which they are legally entitled.

There are legal requirements for organisations to adjust for disability in the hiring process, Sheard says. But that requires people to disclose their disability straight up when they have no trust with this employer. And these systems change traditional recruitment practices, so you dont know what the assessment is all about, you dont know an algorithm is going to assess you or how. You might not know that you need a reasonable adjustment.

Australia has no laws specifically governing AI recruitment tools. While the department of industry has developed an AI ethics framework, which includes principles of transparency, explainability, accountability and privacy, the code is voluntary.

There are low levels of understanding in the community about AI systems, and because employers are very reliant on these vendors, they deploy [the tools] without any governance systems, Sheard says.

Employers dont have any bad intent, they want to do the right things but they have no idea what they should be doing. There are no internal oversight mechanisms set up, no independent auditing systems to ensure there is no bias.

Hyman says client feedback and independent research shows that the broader community is comfortable with recruiters using AI.

They need to have an experience that is inviting, inclusive and attracts more diversity, Hyman says. She says Sapias untimed, low-stress, text-based system fits this criteria.

You are twice as likely to get women and keep women in the hiring process when youre using AI. Its a complete fiction that people dont want it and dont trust it. We see the complete opposite in our data.

Research from the Diversity Council of Australia and Monash University is not quite so enthusiastic, showing there is a clear divide between employers and candidates who were converted or cautious about AI recruitment tools, with 50% of employers converted to the technology but only a third of job applicants. First Nations job applicants were among those most likely to be worried.

DCA recommends recruiters be transparent about the due diligence protocols they have in place to ensure AI-supported recruitment tools are bias-free, inclusive and accessible.

In the Sapia demonstration, the AI quickly generates brief notes of personality feedback at the end of the application for the interviewee.

This is based on how someone rates on various markers, including conscientiousness and agreeableness, which the AI matches with pre-written phrases that resemble something a life coach might say.

A more thorough assessment not visible to the applicant would be sent to the recruiter.

Sapia says its chat-interview software analysed language proficiency, with a profanity detector included too, with the company saying these were important considerations for customer-facing roles.

Hyman says the language analysis is based on the billion words of data collected from responses in the years since the tech company was founded in 2013. The data itself is proprietary.

So, could Guardian Australian work for Michael Scott at the fictional paper company Dunder Mifflin?

You are self-assured but not overly confident, the personality feedback says in response to Guardian Australias application in the AI demonstration.

It follows with a subtle suggestion that this applicant might not be a good fit for the receptionist role, which requires repetition, routine and following a defined process.

But it has some helpful advice: Potentially balance that with variety outside of work.

Looks like were not a good fit for this job.

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Robot recruiters: can bias be banished from AI hiring? - The Guardian

There are four distinct developments that propel artificial intelligence forward today, said Deep Nishar, a managing director at venture capital firm General Catalyst.

And Nishar would know.

The investor co-led the firms recent $350 million funding in Adept AI, a year-old company with a founding team that hails from OpenAI and Google Brain. The firm has also led investments in AI talent platform Eightfold AI and AI health care company Aidoc.

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While the promise of AI has percolated for decades, the sector has only heated up fairly recently with the launch of ChatGPT-3 in November and the fast iteration of GPT-4 last week.

ChatGPT is a meaningful step forward, said Nishar. More important than the technology, it has fired up the imaginations of nontechnical people. Its probably the fastest thing that ever got 100 million users using it all at once.

Nishar has been investing for the better part of eight years, and began his investing career at the SoftBank Vision Fund in 2015 where he led funding in AI hardware company SambaNova, and AI therapies company Deep Genomics. His career spanned across major technology companies. He joined Google in 2003 before it reached 200 employees and worked on advertising infrastructure, then the early mobile research which became Android. When storied investor Reid Hoffman reached out, he jumped to lead product and user experience at LinkedIn.

Nishar sees four distinct developments that propel artificial intelligence forward today.

The first is the proliferation of really good algorithms. The seminal paper on the transformer models which underlie GPT came out of Google in 2017. Today, Nishar said, Google and OpenAI account for close to 50% of these algorithms.

Vast amounts of data is needed to train these models, which the internet provides from text to speech to image and video.

The third part is computational power, which is getting better and better.

And finally, previously there were only a few hundred individuals from companies like DeepMind in the U.K., Google Brain, Facebook AI research and Apple who understood these models.

Now there are thousands of people who understand the math in these algorithms from both companies and universities.

One view is that any area that requires a lot of compute, and as a result of a lot of capital, becomes a harder venture investment, said Nishar.

Investors have thrown hundreds of millions at the leading companies building AI models which include OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Adept AI, Inflection AI and Character.ai. These teams have come out of Google Brain and OpenAI, and have either launched or will be launching products in months to come, he said.

The technology stack that artificial intelligence developments impact is broad and mimics non AI companies, said Nishar.

They start with hardware chip companies like Nvidia, Cerebras, Graphcore and SambaNova to name a few. In the infrastructure software sector, companies like Anyscale compile the content and orchestrate the AI pipeline. This is followed by tools that help with training the data, from companies including Snorkel and Weights & Biases. And then come the algorithms and apps at the top of the stack.

And there are a whole host of investment opportunities up and down the entire stack.

We are trying to predict a surface area that has not been traversed before, Nishar said.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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The Four Developments Propelling AI Forward: A Conversation With ... - Crunchbase News

Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist who has been called "the godfather of artificial intelligence", says it is "not inconceivable" that AI may develop to the point where it poses a threat to humanity.

The computer scientist sat down with CBS News this week about his predictions for the advancement of AI. He compared the invention of AI to electricity or the wheel.

Hinton, who works at Google and the University of Toronto, said that the development of general purpose AI is progressing sooner than people may imagine. General purpose AI is artificial intelligence with several intended and unintended purposes, including speech recognition, answering questions and translation.

"Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI. And now I think it may be 20 years or less," Hinton predicted. Asked specifically the chances of AI "wiping out humanity," Hinton said, "I think it's not inconceivable. That's all I'll say."

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Geoffrey Hinton, chief scientific adviser at the Vector Institute, speaks during The International Economic Forum of the Americas (IEFA) Toronto Global Forum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2019. (Cole Burston/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Artificial general intelligence refers to the potential ability for an intelligence agent to learn any mental task that a human can do. It has not been developed yet, and computer scientists are still figuring out if it is possible.

Hinton said it was plausible for computers to eventually gain the ability to create ideas to improve themselves.

"That's an issue, right. We have to think hard about how you control that," Hinton said.

MICROSOFT IMPOSES LIMITS ON BING CHATBOT AFTER MULTIPLE INCIDENTS OF INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

A ChatGPT prompt is shown on a device near a public school in Brooklyn, New York, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2023. New York City school officials started blocking this week the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan)

But the computer scientist warned that many of the most serious consequences of artificial intelligence won't come to fruition in the near future.

"I think it's very reasonable for people to be worrying about these issues now, even though it's not going to happen in the next year or two," Hinton said. "People should be thinking about those issues."

Hinton's comments come as artificial intelligence software continues to grow in popularity. OpenAI's ChatGPT is a recently-released artificial intelligence chatbot that has shocked users by being able to compose songs, create content and even write code.

In this photo illustration, a Google Bard AI logo is displayed on a smartphone with a Chat GPT logo in the background. (Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

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"We've got to be careful here," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said about his company's creation earlier this month. "I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this."

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Artificial intelligence 'godfather' on AI possibly wiping out humanity: It's not inconceivable - Fox News