How does automatic scanning of messaging communications using AI add value to

business and society?

Introduction

The advancement in artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) has led to their
application in the field of human communication and interactions. Most human interactions now take
place on messaging platforms such as email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and direct messages,
generating a large volume of data. This presents a challenge and an opportunity for businesses and
governments to derive insights from the data and develop tools that can help solve societal problems.
Governments and businesses now use AI tools such as chatbots, sentiment analysis, automatic replies,
and customer segmentation to scan and analyze these messages (data) generated by people in order to
better understand and interact with the needs of the population. The application of these AI tools has
enhanced efficiency, improved decision-making processes, increased security, streamlined
communication, and helped identify exceptional talent by HR officers. The benefits of AI scanning
systems are explained below:

Improved Human Resource Management

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a drastic change to the work environment of most companies,
putting serious strain on human resource professionals. Artificial intelligence tools are now used by HR
professionals to analyze candidate profiles and perform network analysis. By using artificial intelligence,
HR professionals can automatically scan through candidates' profiles and, based on the candidates' work
experience, skills, and education, make a decision. AI can also perform network analysis to identify
formal and informal relationships in businesses, which can help boost organic exchange of information
(Kleinings, 2022).

Target Marketing and Advertising

This method of marketing uses the power of NLP and artificial intelligence to show ads only to specific
users. The users' historical data, tweets, and internet searches are tracked, scanned, and analyzed by
artificial intelligence algorithms, and based on the user's online behavior, the algorithms predict if they
are likely to convert or not. This helps to place ads only in front of audiences with a higher probability of
making a purchase. This is a very effective way of marketing products and services to customers (Dutta,
2021).

Improved Customer Support

AI-driven customer service is expected to surpass other customer service platforms. It provides 24/7
customer support by automating communication between businesses and clients. The recent
improvements in conversational AI have made it possible for chatbots to communicate in a human-like
manner. Organizations that have implemented chatbots have seen a drastic reduction in the cost of
hiring service agents. This solution is very important for small businesses without the means to hire and
maintain a dedicated human resource team (Blog | EU Business School, 2020).

Content Moderation

As the number of people using social media and other messaging platforms has increased, it has led to
the proliferation of abusive, scamming, illegal, and racist content, making these platforms unsafe. This
has led to the need for moderation of content. The traditional method of simply deleting this type of
content is not sufficient to handle the thousands posted daily, which is where machine learning is
important in automatically scanning and deleting any abnormal content (Shukla, 2022).

Conclusion

The use of artificial intelligence and natural language processing is very important for both businesses
and society. For businesses, it helps to create virtual assistants and conversational interfaces, improve
the hiring process, and make target marketing possible. Society also benefits as governments are able to
use AI to improve security and moderate social media content.

Discuss the ethical issues on using AI to scan messaging communications.

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) software for scanning messaging communication has many applications and
use cases, but it also raises ethical concerns. Some of these concerns are minor, while others pose
significant dangers to society. To guide the development and deployment of these AI software, a
framework called AI ethics has been developed. These rules are necessary because these systems are
intelligent and are used to solve problems that would normally require human intelligence. Without
these rules, the probability of using AI for malicious purposes is very high. The main and fundamental
issues faced by these devices are privacy concerns, surveillance and monitoring, and bias and
discrimination (Pasanen, 2022).

Privacy Concerns

AI poses serious threats to the privacy and security of individuals. This problem arises because AI
requires large amounts of data to learn from, and this data may contain personal and sensitive
information such as medical records, personal finances, debt, criminal records, etc. When this data is
collected and analyzed, it may reveal hidden details about the individual that could be detrimental.
Additionally, AI has the ability to deanonymize encrypted data, which may be data that was not
sufficiently protected or the algorithm is just too advanced (usercentrics, 2022). Many countries have
developed frameworks to address these privacy issues and have enacted laws to prevent AI tools from
accessing certain information to protect their citizens.

Surveillance and Monitoring

Some AI tools are deployed by governments on social media sites for monitoring and surveillance. These
tools are used to track, check, and combat crimes and potential crimes. However, these tools raise
serious ethical concerns as people are afraid of being profiled and tracked by the government. Many
have argued that these tools are perfect for authoritarian government officials who want to implement
undemocratic and dictatorial policies. This may lead to the violation of human rights of individuals who
have opposing ideologies to those of the government (Saheb, 2022).

Discrimination and Bias

Automatic document and text scanning software may use data from extremely biased and judgmental
individuals, leading to AI tools replicating discriminatory and hateful behaviors seen in society today.
This issue has resulted in innocent individuals being profiled as high crime suspects while notorious
gangsters are portrayed as innocent simply because of the extremely biased data used to train the
system. This issue has led to the development of computational methods to certify a dataset before it is
used for training, but this method is not sufficient (Ferrer, 2021). This issue must be addressed so that
we can have an AI that is objective and has a neutral view of the world.

Conclusion

The ethical issues of smart systems used to improve and derive insights from messaging platforms are
worth considering because 80% of our communication now takes place on these platforms.
Governments and policy makers should seek ways to address these privacy issues, as if left unaddressed,
they could pose a serious threat to society.
Reference

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Saheb, T. (2022) ‘“Ethically contentious aspects of artificial intelligence surveillance:

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Ferrer, X. (2021) Bias and Discrimination in AI: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, IEEE

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