AN artificial intelligence (AI) bot has been created with powers to predict births, deaths and everything in between.
But the Danish researchers behind the AI model have a stark warning for the people who want to use it to foretell their own lives.
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The AI chatbot bows to the morbid fascinations of us humans, and our inability to cast our future’s inside balls of crystal.
Named Life2vec by its creators, the bot can tell you all sorts of health and social “life events” that you may experience in the coming years.
From one perspective, lives are simply sequences of events: People are born, visit the paediatrician, start school, move to a new location, get married, and so on.
Sune Lehmann, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark
“It could predict health outcomes,” Sune Lehmann, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and lead author on the life2vec study, told AFP.
“So it could predict fertility or obesity, or you could maybe predict who will get cancer or who doesn’t get cancer.
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“But it could also predict if you’re going to make a lot of money.”
Unlike other life and health-predicting models, Life2vec functions in a similar way to ChatGPT – where users can have conversations with it.
“From one perspective, lives are simply sequences of events: People are born, visit the paediatrician, start school, move to a new location, get married, and so on,” Lehmann added.
It answers those big life questions that everyone wants to know – but couldn’t have an early answer to until now.
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Unfortunately, cyber crooks are trying to monopolise on this human curiosity to see into – or calculate – the future.
The researchers behind the project have warned the public that dodgy copycat apps and websites have started to crop up on the internet.
They claim to be the original Life2vec AI chatbot – or say they offer a similar service.
However, the Life2vec software is currently private and unavailable on the internet, researchers have confirmed.
These copycat sites are likely ploys to steal people’s data and other sensitive information, such as your email address, phone number or credit card details.
They may even be used to spread malware.
Life2vec was created by scientists in Denmark and the US, who fed it a registry of data of six million Danish citizens between 2008 and 2020.
In comparison to ChatGPT, this AI uses information including income, profession, place of residence, injuries and pregnancy history.
When tested on a group of people aged between 35 and 65, half of whom died between 2016 and 2020, researchers found that its predictions were 11 per cent more accurate than that of any other existing AI model.
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FOUR TIPS TO AVOID WEBSITE SCAMS
You can avoid falling for a scam site by looking out for these four red flags:
- No padlock icon on your address bar.
- If you’re using Google Chrome, the browser itself will confirm whether a website is trustworthy or not. So. if It does not display a padlock symbol next to the URL it could mean the website is not safe.
- A suspicious domain name.
- Watch out for spelling mistakes or numbers being used as letters. And think twice if the website leads you to another site with an equally fishy domain name.
- Unbelievable offers.
- If a website is indeed a scam, sometimes there may be a countdown clock to try to create a of feeling of urgency. The same goes for ‘too good to be true’ prices.
- Unusual payment options.
- Normal payment methods include PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, and Apple or Google Pay. A clear indication of a scammer is if an online payment asks you to pay outside of these methods, that is, via a bank transfer or cryptocurrency.
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