TECHNOLOGY & SOFTWARE Looking to the future
Katie Thorn, Project Lead at Digital Care Hub, looks at the potential role of Generative AI in social care and the serious considerations that must be addressed to ensure its safe and responsible use.
If someone mentioned ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) to you in conversation five years ago, what are the chances you would have pictured a walking, talking robot replicating your everyday activities? Well, we’re not quite there yet, but developments in AI are moving so fast that it can feel hard to keep up.
WHAT IS AI?
There are different types of AI consuming our everyday lives, but at its core, it aims to mimic human cognitive activity by executing simple and complex tasks at a rapid rate. In the last couple of years, Generative AI has taken society by storm. If ChatGPT hasn’t elbowed its way onto your computer screen in the last year, then perhaps you’ve been snoozing on your keyboard. ChatGPT’s generative AI large language model – created to hold a conversation with the end user – reached 100 million active users two months aſter its launch in January 2023.
Generative AI can create new content, such as images, music, or text, by learning from large volumes of data available on the internet. For example, language models like ChatGPT use statistical analysis of the most likely answer or response to text inputted by the user, and this can mean that their predictions improve over time and as they are used.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER FOR SOCIAL CARE? People are using Generative AI across all industries, as well as
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in their personal lives. It would be wrong to assume that this isn’t the case for social care. A lot has been written over the last year or so about the potential for Generative AI to create significant ‘efficiencies’ across all sectors and considering the complex nature of our sector, being more efficient in our jobs sounds like a luxury a lot of us would be pleased to have.
Care managers can use it to help write up workplace policies or to summarise meeting notes; care staff can ask for its help to suggest activities for the people they support; and marketing teams can benefit from content creation ideas for their next blog post.
There’s no doubt that there are lots of opportunities to harness with Generative AI. Employers are rightly looking at this as an option to improve business functions. There are also, however, some serious considerations that we must address to ensure its safe and responsible use.
This is why the Digital Care Hub collaborated with the Institute of Ethical AI at Oxford University and Casson Consulting to convene the first social care roundtable in England on the responsible use of generative AI in adult social care. The full-day event brought together sector leaders, academics, technologists, care providers and people with lived experience to discuss the possible benefits of generative AI, the concerns and risks people envision, and what support the sector might
www.tomorrowscare.co.uk
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