SINGAPORE: TikTok chief executive officer Chew Shou Zi on Monday (Oct 12) called for a better understanding of how to manage the risks that artificial intelligence (AI) will bring, adding that he sees the need for "a lot of education" in this area.
This was in response to a question about what areas of AI are not receiving enough attention during a dialogue at the DBS Asia Future Forward conference.
"I think the cybersecurity risks are quite real," said Mr Chew.
He said users may be giving agentic AI models permission to do things without really understanding what permissions they are actually giving, citing how those who give AI agents access to their credit cards to make purchases could end up buying much more than they need.
Unlike large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude that mainly answer questions, AI agents are designed to carry out tasks.
In the case of corporates, agentic models have dramatically reduced the cost of creating spam, he said. While spam on any platform cannot be reduced to zero, he said, the focus for businesses should be to "make it too expensive for people to do too much spam on your platform", he added.
Businesses need the right tools to defend against the fast-falling cost of creating security problems for platforms like TikTok, said Mr Chew. The short-form video app now has about 2.21 billion users worldwide, reported digital research platform DataReportal in April.
Highlighting that developing skills to use AI effectively will be important in the next two to three years, he urged individuals to be hands-on with AI.
“If you don’t use these models and you don’t use these products yourself, you cannot figure out what exactly you can or cannot do just by reading about it,” he added.
Employees have to be trained not to share trade secrets or privileged legal information with public chatbots, said Mr Chew.
“It’s such a useful tool to have, so people sometimes are overenthusiastic about how they use it. Understanding where the boundaries of what is reasonable and acceptable use is important.”
AI SHORT-TERM POTENTIAL OVERESTIMATED
Responding to a question about extreme responses to AI from proponents and opponents alike, the TikTok CEO said the world is probably overestimating AI in the short term, but underestimating it in the long term.
“The trend is very clear. We are only at the beginning of what artificial intelligence can probably do,” he said.
Noting how AI has contributed to progress in areas of science, Mr Chew said he expects to see a real scientific breakthrough because of AI in the next two to three years.
In the short term, humans need time to adopt this kind of technology, and this “sand in the gears” is probably going to slow down progress, he added.
“But it’s risky to think that just because it’s slow in the shorter term, that it will not become very important in the long term. That’s the wrong conclusion.”
When asked if he thinks of AI possibly replacing human beings, Mr Chew said it was “a little bit too early” to be conclusive about it.
On one hand, the technology is still catching up, he said, highlighting that AI models still cannot learn certain things at the same speed as a human being.
“But you can see a world where silicon is just superior to carbon,” he added.
Silicon is a key material in the semiconductor chips that go into the machines that power AI, while carbon forms the structural framework for all major organic molecules, including all living things.
Silicon will last longer, it’s more scalable, and it is easier to connect information using technology than through human beings, said Mr Chew.
“It is a non-zero chance that it … could become superior in certain aspects.”
TikTok still sees an imbalance between the percentage of videos that are AI-generated or created using AI, and the number of views they get, said the platform’s CEO.
Even with a recommendation algorithm powered by AI, this shows what people want to see, he said.
On TikTok, about 59 per cent of videos served to a new account’s For You feed are AI slop, according to a June report from San Francisco-based video creation tool company Kapwing. The report defined "AI slop" as videos with obvious AI-generated visuals, along with low-quality compilations using clearly AI-generated scripts and voiceovers.
Mr Chew noted that viewers who just watch AI content on TikTok make up a low, single-digit percentage of users.
People still value authenticity, he said, adding that when viewers see a video that is “very obviously not real”, there is still pushback in terms of consumption.
“There’s a lot of experimenting with using AI to create more content, and a lot of it is a lot more creative than you can ever imagine. But at the same time, human adoption of just watching AI content is not the same at this moment in time.”