ASHRAE Journal - August 2023 - 64

REFRIGERATION APPLICATIONS
COLUMN
Andy Pearson
The Dark Side of AI
BY ANDY PEARSON, PH.D., C.ENG., FELLOW ASHRAE
Last month's column gave a brief overview of the possible applications of artificial
intelligence to the refrigeration industry and was almost entirely a verbatim response
from an AI bot to the question " write a 600-word column for an industry journal
on the possible advantages that AI will bring to the refrigeration industry. " The only
bit not created by the chatbot was the final sentence of 21 words, which posed the
question " how much of the column was written by AI? "
So 95.7% of the words published last month came
unaltered from a single pass through a software
portal and I didn't disagree with anything that the bot
suggested. Some of it was a little clunky and didn't quite
fit my style-for example I abhor
the use of the word " impact "
as a synonym for " effect " -but
overall I have to say it was
very impressive. However, I'm
aware that this is partly because
we were deliberately playing
to the bot's strengths. It is a
" large language model, " which
doesn't mean using words like
" sesquipedalian, " but rather that
the algorithm behind the portal
draws on billions of connections
between words to build a coherent, meaningful
response based on all of the previous connections it has
encountered. It is what is known as a " Generative PreTrained
Transformer " (GPT) and the economy of scale
that this creates is difficult to imagine. It is what makes
AI so impressive, but it has some drawbacks.
I'm not talking here about the existential threats
ENIAC claimed to have hit the winning home run for the Cardinals
in the 1946 World Series, but Betty and Fran were skeptical.
algorithms have also shown a tendency to " hallucinate, "
creating responses that are untrue and presenting them
as fact because they fit the pool of data on which the
tool was trained which was itself fallible. The problem
when AI's hallucinations enter
the public domain is that they
reinforce the false as well as the
true. This disadvantage is a bit
like the fallacy of patent novelty:
patent applications are thoroughly
assessed by skilled examiners,
but generally only by reference to
previous patent applications and
publications. This can prove that
an idea is novel with regard to
that data set, but it only takes one
magazine article, academic paper
or news clipping to demonstrate a lack of novelty that
destroys the whole edifice.
posed by AI in science fiction classics like " Terminator "
or " Blade Runner, " but rather the limits imposed by
reference to a finite data set, no matter how big or
sophisticated it is. For example although publicly
available AI tools have advanced enormously since the
beginning of this year, and continue to do so, they are
still not very good at number related activities (the " 600
word " response last month was only 472 words). The
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This means that any text presented by AI needs to be
checked carefully for relevance and completeness as
well as accuracy. It is a fantastic tool in assisting with the
effective communication of complex ideas, but like all
the other tools that we use daily, such as search engines,
grammar checkers or voice-activated digital assistants,
it needs an occasional reality check. Discernment, as
I mentioned in the column in December last year, is
perhaps the most valuable skill that we can develop
from an interest in mathematics. The rapid advance of
AI capability has just increased that value.
Andy Pearson, Ph.D., C.Eng., is group managing director at Star Refrigeration in
Glasgow, UK.
https://ashrae.org/
ASHRAE Journal - August 2023

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