James Flynn explains how artificial intelligence, in particular ChatGPT, could be used as an enabler in the food sector considering its pros and cons.

In a flash of brilliant white light artificial intelligence (AI) exploded into our lives during 2023 with the much lauded, and maligned, advent of ChatGPT, despite AI being around since the 1950's. Human emotions on the matter have been palpable. What's different about AI now? Why all the excitement, and fear? What makes AI a ‘killer app’ and, more importantly, what kind of killer is it? These are just some of the questions on everyone's mind.

Naturally, when innovation occurs there are segments of the population who have strong views resulting in a noisy spectrum of emotions due to the unknowns and our human lack of ability to predict future outcomes. Some people don’t like change, some fear it, others embrace and even crave it and yet others simply don’t care. In my view innovative changes should be welcomed once we understand what the implications are, both good and bad, along with an understanding of the balance of benefits arising from it. AI is a clear example of an innovation which we are now starting to understand more and is now becoming widely adopted and proving its potential daily. As a food safety specialist who happens to have many years of experience in software development and a lifelong interest in food safety and innovation, the era of AI is the most exciting technology development in my lifetime. AI surpasses even the birth of the world wide web from which it spawns.

To illustrate the scale of this innovation: the world's top companies by number of AI patents owned in 2013 collectively owned around 7,000 patents, in 2018 that number was more than 24,000. By the end of 2022 the total number of patents held was close to 95,000 with seven out of 10 of these companies being Chinese. This AI patent data shows we are experiencing what looks very much like a ‘Cambrian evolutionary explosion’ of AI innovation driven by the Internet and cloud computing technology with China very much in the driving seat. The Chinese companies, like Alibaba and WeChat owners Tencent, are competing fiercely in this space with western behemoths like Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM.

A SWOT analysis like the one below can tease apart the good and bad from the myriad of opinions. Full disclaimer: ChatGPT was used to provide this analysis using the prompt ‘Act as an expert in swot analysis with respect to the use and application of AI in society’, so this is interesting in itself:

ChatGPT was also kind enough to supply a conclusion as follows: ‘In conclusion, AI has immense potential to benefit society through automation, data analysis, and innovation. However, it also brings challenges related to bias, privacy, and ethical concerns. Addressing these challenges and maximizing AI's potential will require collaboration between governments, businesses, and society to ensure responsible and equitable deployment of AI technologies.’ This information was sense checked by me, a human, and I feel it did a very good job in the sub-five seconds it took to give me the above answers. I’m not sure I could have done any better in several hours it would have taken me, a mere mortal, to research and then think about it before planning and documenting it.

What this simple example illustrates very well is that when humans use AI as a tool it can be an incredible enabler, and this is where most of the focus should be, i.e., what can AI do for us? Whilst there will always be a, relatively, very small number of people who want to use AI for harmful purposes, the rest of us can benefit from AI to improve our lives in many ways which are becoming clear as time passes. We may also be able to use AI to defend ourselves from bad actors. The big question for me then is how can AI as an enabler help in the food sector?