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Gates says the artificial intelligence that drives the back-end of websites is rapidly evolving, and it needs to be robust.
When Facebook opened its ReConnect feature earlier this year, it connected a lot of users. But an analysis from the New York Times found that a significant portion of those users were experiencing difficulties in navigating the site.
"If you look at something like the websites that enable users to enter a log-in, it looks like it's a very straightforward UI: user types in their login, clicks log in. But what's actually going on is that there's a number of different parties that are parsing these inputs," says Gates.
Artificial intelligence systems are much better at parsing words and identifying patterns than humans are. To an AI system, a log-in looks like a log-in, not like a user trying to enter information.
"Some of the things that were happening were that people were getting stuck in the password process, that was often related to their phone number," he says. "And the process of creating a password was becoming a lot more complex than was necessary, so that people were having to create multiple different passwords in order to get back into their account."
But this is just one example. If AI takes over the process of navigation, users may no longer even be aware of the fact that they're interacting with artificial intelligence. And this could be dangerous.
Even if users only understand the capabilities of AI, and not the back-end of a website, they should still be aware of the potential pitfalls.
"If we create enough data that it's easy for an AI to learn how to interpret that data, it doesn't need to ever know what the back-end was," says Gates. "It just needs to know what the output was."
That could pose a serious threat to user security, he says.
The job of the front-end (the UI) of a website should be a relatively simple process. But it's not.
"The front-end is actually much more complicated than a log-in process," says Gates. "As AI gets smarter, it's going to be able to parse more and more data, but there will still be cases where it's very difficult for people to understand what's actually going on."
Gates says the concept of artificial intelligence is actually more nuanced than the way it's commonly portrayed.
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