Cheaper--and More Creative--Use of AI to Come

Despite investment, research publications and job demand in the field continuing to grow through 2019, technologists are starting to come to terms with potential limitations in what AI can realistically achieve. Meanwhile, a growing movement is grappling with its ethics and social implications, and widespread business adoption remains stubbornly low. As a result, companies and organizations are increasingly pushing tools that commoditize existing predictive and image recognition machine learning, making the tech easier to explain and use for non-coders. Emerging breakthroughs, like the ability to create synthetic data and open-source language processors that require less training than ever, are aiding these efforts. At the same time, the use of AI for nefarious ends like deepfakes and the mass-production of spam are still in their earliest theoretical stages, and troubling reports indicate such dystopia may become more real in 2020.