The 7 best uses of AI in everyday life – and the 7 most controversial

Voice assistants first appeared many years ago, but recently they’ve become frighteningly effective, thanks to advances in AI. Siri and Alexa, to name the best-known, enable individuals to organize their daily lives more easily, perform quick searches with their voice, order food or book a cab or flight.

Who hasn’t dreamed of having an instant interpreter when traveling away from home? Today, this dream is accessible to all, as countless AI-powered applications and devices enable instant translation of any language. What’s more, these tools can translate text taken from photographs as well as sentences and words spoken in person.

The consumption of films, music and other cultural products has become increasingly digital in recent years. Players in the sector have understood this, relying on AI to tailor their offer to each consumer. For example, on video and music streaming platforms, suggestions are more precise and more in line with subscribers’ tastes.

GPS navigation applications have long been criticized for sending motorists down impassable lanes or down one-way streets. These mistakes are now a thing of the past, as, thanks to AI, these applications are refining their route suggestions, improving their knowledge of the roads and increasingly managing to suggest the perfect route for each user.

AI also has numerous applications in the healthcare sector. It enables faster, more accurate diagnosis of diseases, thanks in particular to high-performance analysis of medical imaging images. AI can also help doctors to analyze symptoms and test results more quickly.

AI has also enabled facial recognition to become more sophisticated, almost infallible. This makes it possible to secure smartphones, computers and other connected devices. However, this use of AI is not all good news. It is criticized for infringing on individual privacy in certain cases.

Domestic robots, such as connected vacuum cleaners, window-cleaning robots and lawnmowers, are becoming increasingly widespread. They’re gaining in popularity because they’re more efficient, more autonomous and more precise thanks to their use of AI. AI also makes them easier to use.

Artificial intelligence is also being criticized by defenders of rights and freedoms, as it can be (and in some countries already is) used as a tool for mass surveillance. Drones, facial-recognition cameras and surveillance software are all threats to individual privacy and rights.

artificial intelligence can also be used to create images. These are becoming increasingly realistic and more easily deceptive. These AI-generated images and videos are frightening, as they are already being used by ill-intentioned actors to manipulate opinion, scare or swindle the most gullible.

some banks use AI to calculate their customers’ credit scores. This use is problematic, as the errors that AI can make in this case are numerous. It lacks the personalized, case-by-case approach of a human analyst, which creates inequalities and injustices in access to credit.

Other companies use artificial intelligence to manage their recruitment processes. Applicants’ CVs are scanned, analyzed, sorted and ranked by AI. This removes the human element from the recruitment process, to the detriment of both candidates and companies, who may be deprived of skilled employees who have been unfairly passed over.

Many are concerned that AI could be used to automate the correction and grading of student papers. Such use would be problematic, as no AI can, like a human teacher, grasp the subtleties of answers. Errors and injustices are therefore legitimately feared by parents and students alike.

One of the most disastrous developments that AI could undergo would be its use in autonomous weapons that decide to fire without human intervention. This would further dehumanize warfare, making it even more difficult to distinguish between civilians and legitimate targets in conflict. Unfortunately, some countries are already developing such weapons.

More and more companies are using AI to refine their advertising targeting by extracting and analyzing data from individuals. This information often falls within the realm of privacy and can be highly intimate, which makes this practice particularly worrying, especially as it is used by very powerful international groups.