Beyond the hype
Meet Joe, Vodafone Fiji’s champion customer service officer. Joe is a chatbot, powered by Artificial Intelligence, a 24/7 assistant that was first launched by the company in 2019.
Joe has been hard at work for Vodafone Fiji for several years, with Chief Commercial Officer, Ronald Prasad noting: “Joe is highly skilled to provide responses to simple inquiries such as balance checks, phone prices, checking sim status, APN settings, information on plans, roaming, and current promotions.”
Artificial Intelligence (AI) may have become a buzzword with the public launch of ChatGPT last November, but many Pacific Islanders have been benefitting and using AI-enabled services, like Joe, for many years.
Speaking at the AI for Good Global Summit earlier this month, United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, said: “The development of artificial intelligence, or AI, ‘for the good of all’ requires guardrails grounded in human rights, transparency, and accountability.”
He stressed that AI must benefit all, including the third of humanity who are still offline, and insisted on the urgent need to find consensus on what the guiding norms for AI deployment should be.
A recent PWC Global Artificial Intelligence Study projects that “AI could contribute up to US$15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, more than the current output of China and India combined.”
But how prepared is the Pacific for the new age of AI and the opportunities and challenges it presents?
AI and education
At the University of the South Pacific’s School of Information Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics, students will be introduced to the use of ChatGPT and other AI apps as part of their curriculum next year.
Head of School, Professor Maurizio Cirrincione says employers will expect the workforce to use ChatGPT and similar ‘transformer decoders.’
“In my opinion it is wrong to ban the use of ChatGPT for our students, since this is something that will be requested. We have to guide them. We can’t stop it,” he says.
The university’s introductory course in numeracy and computing will include familiarlisation with ChatGPT and generative networks from next year, across the Pacific region.
“This is the first step,” Professor Maurizio notes. “During my course, I don’t ask the students not to use ChatGPT. You can use it, because it can help you. If you want to make an assignment or a project it can give you the structure, it tells you, it guides you.
“But what they [then] have to do is to make an oral presentation. That is, they have to be able to defend what is written, they have to be able to see what the sources are. So, they can use as a tool, [but] they must be able to explain what is written.”
Geraldine Panapasa, a media practitioner and journalism teaching assistant at USP says while ChatGPT and paraphrasing tools like Quilbot can help improve English and writing skills, s there are limitations. “It is not good at value judgements, critical evaluation, or critical thinking,” she notes..
A final year USP literature and journalism student, Nikhil Kumar, says AI tools “helped me a lot with exam preparation, and as a literature student, it gave me lots of tips for essays, and I also use it before exams to refresh my knowledge.”
AI transforming the law
The legal sector is also experiencing the impacts of AI. A Deloitte report estimates that the legal profession is set to lose 39% of current jobs to automation in the next 20 years.
John Ridgway, who is the Head of Legal Services at regional law firm, the Pacific Legal Network (PLN), notes that internationally, “Some law firms are using AI in due diligence exercises to analyse and summarise thousands of the same or similar contracts, almost instantly.”
Ridgway says document intelligence technology, and similar tools, can be particularly beneficial for smaller firms.
“This is especially the case with practice management, which is one of the main challenges of running a small law firm. AI can be used by small law firms—including those in the Pacific—to assist with legal research, billing, or electronic discovery,” he adds.
According to the legal practitioner, in jurisdictions like the United States, law firms can engage businesses to analyse the history of decision-making by a particular judge. While in the past, the technology to assist with this process was limited; the advent and development of AI means this type of information is readily available to law firms of all sizes and types.
Ridgway said, “The information gathered in this process can be used to try to predict a likely outcome in litigation at an early stage, arguably to try to limit or reduce the need to conduct fruitless litigation.”
At PLN, Artificial Intelligence is employed to manage services to its client base.
“A simple example of this is the utilisation of AI in our social media and web site profiling. We use algorithms to access and track how our clients have found us, who is looking us up on the web, and how we can best provide useful information for people looking to do business in the Pacific,” Ridgway explains.
PLN recently launched its own App as a way of providing information to businesses across the Pacific.
“What everyone needs to do is look beyond the ‘hype’ of AI and recognise that machine learning-enabled technologies are being used every day in medicine, education, the military, surveillance, finance and its regulations, agriculture, entertainment, retail, customer service, transportation, robotics, science, and manufacturing,” he notes.
Areas of concern
In some quarters, AI has been portrayed as the potential harbinger of a dystopian future, in which, as the Secretary-General of the International Telecommunications Union, Doreen Bogdan-Martin warns: “AI destroyed jobs and enabled an uncontrollable spread of disinformation, or in which only wealthy countries reaped the benefits of the technology.”
Pacific software developer George Fong is a co-founder of a financial technology company called Infinity Plus One, which specialises in systems for core banking and provident funds. Established nine years ago, the company’s clients include the Kiribati Provident Fund and Tuvalu National Provident Fund.
Fong explains that “AI is a tool like any other, and it has the capability of solving many issues, but in my opinion, it is just that, if you have the right use for it, it can transform your business; it’s not going to be an answer to everything.
“It has the opportunity to change a lot of things and is definitely going to be a big disruption; people are going to be replaced in jobs and industries once it matures, so people need to be ready for that, but if it’s used properly, it can be a great tool for many people.”
Additional reporting: Prerna Priyanka and Samantha Magick
