The cosmetic tweaks made to generative AI by their owners – all foreign, most American – perhaps make them more attractive. They are no more aware of the fine nuances of culture and customs in Quebec, warn two experts from HEC Montréal.
Published at 11:00 a.m.
“Quebec’s emphasis on AI will no longer help with the detailed understanding of a culture and a language,” said in an interview with The Press Luc Lspérance, lecturer in artificial intelligence and computer technologies at HEC Montréal. “These are correlative models based on very broad training, we sense a convergence in what generative AI produces. »
A convergence that favors a point of view from outside Quebec, even when the user asks the AI to look into an issue that does not go beyond the borders of the province. “Often, the same question asked in English and in French will not produce the same answer,” continues Luc Lspérance. “The one in English will have more content, which will then have to be translated. »
The HEC Montreal professor made his remarks in the wake of the launch of a tool about AI that the Montreal university has just put online on its site. “Artificial intelligence in French for the business world” is a “decision-making tool on AI”, and not an AI as such, specifies Caroline Aubé, full professor and director of research and transfer at HEC Montreal.
The site wants to help leaders determine whether adopting AI is a good thing for their business, and if so, what kind of AI should be. “We have been studying decision sciences for decades. We have a team of experts from all fields who have analyzed the adoption of AI tools. We questioned ethics and governance. We work with organizations that have needs on the ground, we support them in technological changes. »
“That’s how we developed this tool. »
The limits of AI
Contrary to what the champions of technology say, generative AI has its limits, and, seen from Quebec, they are arriving faster than we think. Especially in business. Especially (bis) in customer service. Especially (ter) if we hope to set up a dialogue capable of automatically answering questions from current and potential customers.
“This is a case where you’ll have to do a lot of configuration in the background, to set the right tone, the right pool of knowledge…” It’s a lot more work than you might think. ChatGPT can’t just plug into a company’s catalog and start selling their products!
“These are limits that dampen many businesses,” continues Luc Lspérance.
This is not trivial: using AI as a conversational agent is probably the first application of this technology that will be presented to many companies. A bit like a Trojan horse, by AI developers who have an interest in making a good first impression, since they hope to sell more and more applications later.
The potential of AI to summarize very extensive documents and to produce a simple response from a corpus of texts is known. It’s natural. Even HEC Montréal is experimenting with such a tool, internally. A kind of digital assistant for searching through the university directory, its administrative tools, etc., to help students find their way around.
“We ask ourselves the same questions as everyone else,” says Luc Lspérance. “We encourage ethical use of generative AI, both in classes and at the teaching level. We are working with other universities to see how to integrate AI into management, research and correction. »
All of this creates expertise that HEC Montréal hopes to share with Quebec companies… and with the government, to which specialists have recommended several times in recent months to assess the relevance of creating an entirely local AI infrastructure, in order to better serve Quebec interests in the digital world.
HEC Montréal does not say it directly, but its experts are in favor of pushing further the question of creating a Quebec model of advanced language, also called an LLM, or the black box behind current generative AI.
“It has to be part of the thinking,” says Caroline Aubé. And if it comes up, we will want to participate! » With or without accent.
