Artificial intelligence is a breakthrough technology. I had a subject in college on artificial intelligence. It wasn't as sophisticated as it is now. But it was fascinating that the systems we were taught to build basically learns from mistakes based on rules we define. It was more rules driven than data driven, most likely because feeding massive terabytes of data to AI wasn't feasible then due to device and tech limitations. 

Fast forward to today. People don't need to create their own AI systems. They can easily subscribe to an AI service and immediately start using it without worrying about feeding it global data. What the AI needs, though, is personal data, and that's what we happen to be inputting whenever we use AI, be it in the form of personal thoughts, preferences, likes, and dislikes. We expect AI to give us personalized outputs, which it efficiently does. What we may fail to realize is that this is that the data is a two-way highway. We send data, and we receive data. We store data sent by AI, and guess what? AI also stores our data. 

So what we're doing when we're sending AI input, is that we're feeding it with our data. And AI systems thrive on data crunching and retrieval. So it's a double edged sword. AI can help us. But we are indirectly helping AI by feeding our data to them.  

In a way, it's also like malware. Someone creates a nice and useful app but embeds malicious code so it can also benefit from the people who use it. I can't generalize and say that all AI systems are like this, but that's where ethics of AI plays a role and the Pope's latest manifesto citing Articitial Intelligence brings a humanitarian aspect to it.  I've read a bit and encourage everyone to see the Pope's stance and viewpoint on this.

For now, be careful with the data you feed AI.