Is the Arab world ready for the uncertain age of AI-powered web tools?

Thousands attended February’s LEAP 2023 conference in Riyadh, where the biggest names in tech showcased their products and discussed industry trends. (Supplied)
Short Url
Updated 09 March 2023
Follow

Is the Arab world ready for the uncertain age of AI-powered web tools?

  • Described as a “tipping point” in artificial intelligence, ChatGPT and Bard pose both challenges and opportunities 
  • Arab countries will have to deal with chatbot tools’ potential for destroying jobs and creating new ones

DUBAI/RIYADH: Silicon Valley startup OpenAI caused a sensation when it released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot tool capable of formulating detailed, human-like answers on a seemingly limitless range of topics. In retrospect, that was just the start. 

Google has since announced its own web tool, Bard, in an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT. Both tools are built on large language models, which are trained on vast troves of data in a way that they can generate impressive responses to user prompts.

Conversations with ChatGPT — GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer — show that the program is capable of explaining complex scientific concepts, writing plays and poetry, composing university dissertations, and even crafting functional lines of computer code. 

Such programs can hold a conversation with any human user, no matter their IT experience or background. They have also written fake scientific reports, convincing enough to fool scientists, and even been used to write a children’s book.

Described by some experts as a “tipping point” in artificial intelligence technology, ChatGPT responds to “natural language questions on any topic and gives in-depth answers that read as if they were written by a human,” according to the World Economic Forum. 




Conversations with ChatGPT — GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer — show that the program is capable of explaining complex scientific concepts. (AFP)

However, the web tools of Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google have raised fears about their potential misuse to spread disinformation, orchestrate sophisticated deep fake scams, cheat in school exams, and even destroy writing jobs, rendering authors, journalists, and marketing professionals redundant. 

How the technology is received, responds and is eventually regulated will be closely watched by several of the Arab Gulf states, many of which have launched their own national strategies for adopting and investing in AI.

Saudi Arabia launched its National Strategy for Data and Artificial Intelligence in October 2020, aimed at making the Kingdom a global leader in the field as it seeks to attract $20 billion in foreign and local investments by 2030. 

The Kingdom also aims to transform its workforce by training and developing a pool of 20,000 AI and data specialists. 

The UAE has likewise made AI investment a top priority, becoming the first nation in the world to appoint a minister of state for artificial intelligence. Omar Sultan Al-Olama took on the brief in October 2017 to spearhead the UAE’s expanding digital economy.

The Middle East is projected to accrue 2 percent of the total global benefits of AI by the end of the decade, equivalent to $320 billion, with AI expected to contribute more than $135.2 billion to the Saudi economy, according to PwC. 





The Ameca humanoid robot
​​​greets visitors at Dubai’s Museum of the Future. (AFP)

Founded in late 2015, OpenAI is led by Sam Altman, a 37-year-old entrepreneur and former president of startup incubator Y Combinator. The firm is best known for its automated creation software GPT-3 for text generation and DALL-E for image generation. 

OpenAI has long counted on financial support from tech industry leaders, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, investor Peter Thiel, and Tesla boss Elon Musk, who served on the start-up’s board until 2018. 

In January this year, multinational tech corporation Microsoft upped its initial 2019 investment in the firm worth $1 billion to $10 billion, meaning the company is now valued at roughly $29 billion.

Google’s core product — online search — is widely thought to be facing its most significant challenge since its launch in 1996. Reports claim the enormous attention being attracted by ChatGPT has spurred Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its search business.

ChatGPT is being used to obtain answers to questions many people would previously have searched for on Google’ flagship search tool. Last month, Microsoft announced that the next version of its Bing search engine would be powered by OpenAI. Also on the cards is a new version of the Edge web browser with OpenAI chat tech in a window to help users browse and understand web pages.

Unfortunately for Google, Bard had an embarrassing debut in early February when a video demo of the chatbot showed it giving the wrong answer to a question about the James Webb space telescope.

“ChatGPT is indeed very interesting,” Noaman Sayed, a Dubai-based tech professional and co-founder of the online shopping website DeenSquare, told Arab News. 

“If you look into the past, every innovation and advancement has had discussions raised in relation to concern, whether it was planes, cars, mobiles, the internet, Google, YouTube, social media and more. 

“Looking back, we can all say that these have eventually made not only our lives easier, they are also seen as the norm now. I’m very optimistic that with further development and time, ChatGPT will also make our lives easier and shall be the norm.” 

Not everyone is as optimistic as Sayed, however. Given the rapid pace of technological change now underway, many workers are concerned their professional functions will soon be entirely replaced by machinery, in the same way earlier bouts of automation eliminated farming and manufacturing jobs. 

Many industry experts argue such job losses will likely be offset by a rise in the number of new skilled roles in designing, building and maintaining AI products, necessitating a shift in the kind of education governments ought to provide to their future workforce.

INNUMBERS 

• $119.78bn AI’s estimated global market value in 2022.

• $15.7tn What AI is expected to contribute to the global economy by 2030.

• 13x AI industry’s projected growth over next 8 years.

• 97m Projected number of people working in AI by 2024.

Although Sayed accepts AI will alter the way people interact and communicate, he is confident humans will “learn how to adapt with changes over time” in the same way they accepted and adjusted to past technological leaps. In many ways, they already are. 

“Over the last few years, some of us may have already engaged with some form of AI product (knowingly or unknowingly) during our discussion with call centers, websites chatbots, hospital surgeries, Siri, Alexa, some Google products, certain vehicle manufacturers and more,” he said.

Beyond the future job market, chatbots are also creating headaches for educational institutions. Some colleges have reintroduced paper-based tests to stop students from using AI during exams after some students were caught using chatbots to answer test questions.

New York City’s education department has banned ChatGPT on its networks because of “concerns about negative impacts on student learning.” A group of Australian universities have also said they would change exam formats to prevent AI cheating.

On January 27, the Sciences Po school in Paris, one of the most prestigious universities in France, announced that anyone found to have used the chatbot would face “sanctions which can go as far as expulsion from the establishment or even from higher learning.”

Using data harvested from the web, ChatGPT was even able to pass exams at Minnesota University Law School after writing essays on topics ranging from constitutional law to taxation and torts — reportedly earning a C+ grade.

Some companies are now marketing programs they claim can catch a text written by AI to help prevent cheating.




The Middle East is projected to accrue 2 percent of the global benefits of AI by the end of the decade, equivalent to $320 billion. (Shutterstock)

Despite the temptation to rely on such programs to answer exam questions, replace existing search engines, or provide unbiased news coverage, Jenna Burrell, director of research at Data & Society, an independent non-profit research organization based in California, said people need to take ChatGPT’s answers with a pinch of salt.

“ChatGPT simplifies things and is fun to play with. (It) can be very useful for journalists,” Burrell said during a recent webinar on how the technology might impact the work of media professionals. However, the information it gives “is not up to date…(and) there is a need for fact-checking.”

Burrell said AI is not going to be able to replace every professional function, as it cannot fully imitate human innovation, creativity, skepticism, and reasoning.

Furthermore, ChatGPT, which is based on “a large-language model,” is not the only emergent form of AI — and not necessarily its most sophisticated. Reinforcement learning, generative adversarial networks, and symbolic AI are all alternative models that are nipping at its heels.

“Large-language models are trained by pouring into them billions of words of everyday text, gathered from sources ranging from books to tweets and everything in between. The LLMs draw on all this material to predict words and sentences in certain sequences,” Dan Milmo and Alex Hern, the tech editors of the UK’s Guardian newspaper, said in a recent feature.

“LLMs do not understand things in a conventional sense — and they are only as good, or as accurate, as the information with which they are provided. They are essentially machines for matching patterns. Whether the output is ‘true’ is not the point, so long as it matches the pattern.”

Asked directly by Arab News whether it ultimately plans to replace human writers, ChatGPT offered a measure of reassurance — appearing to acknowledge its own creative and analytical limitations in a tone that might be construed as modesty.

“My abilities are limited to generating text based on patterns and patterns I have seen during my training on text data,” ChatGPT said.

“Human writers bring creativity, emotion and personal perspective that I am not able to replicate. Moreover, human writers are able to interpret, analyze and bring their own perspective and insight to a text.”




“Don’t demonize AI as it will be a part of our lives. I insisted that I use it to prove that it can deliver a pretty good speech,” said Ahmed Belhoul Al-Falasi, UAE minister of education. 

ChatGPT said it was programmed to “assist” in content creation on social media, blogs, and websites and write business plans, reports, emails and presentations; legal documents such as contracts; medical reports and summaries; and responses to customer inquiries and complaints.

Despite its many possible applications, in everything from entertainment to medical diagnosis, and its immense investment potential, with forecasts valuing in the trillions of dollars, the age of AI remains fraught with anxiety.

“Trust is key to the safe expansion of the use of AI solutions around the world, Dr. Scott Nowson, PwC Middle East’s artificial intelligence lead, told Arab News at the LEAP technology conference in Riyadh in early February.

While there are “some skills and some tasks that are better suited to automation with technology,” he said, the use of AI is “still contingent upon human intelligence and awareness.”

Nowson added: “There’s as much optimism as there is pessimism over AI. People believe AI will completely replace us when I really don’t think it will. I think we’re many generations away from when AI becomes greater than human capabilities.”

As the nations of the Gulf region pursue their national AI strategies, establishing schools to teach the next generation of tech developers, it is only a matter of time before similar products emerge on the regional market.

Sayed, the DeenSquare co-founder, expects governments, businesses, and tech developers across the Gulf region to follow AI-powered tools’ growth and applications with interest.

“I’m certain that in their upcoming strategy review meetings, the latest trends will be discussed to see how it can assist in their strategy to their advantage.”


Norway fund’s ethics body reviews Israeli bank stakes over West Bank settler loans

Updated 3 sec ago
Follow

Norway fund’s ethics body reviews Israeli bank stakes over West Bank settler loans

  • Around 700,000 Israeli settlers live among 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem

OSLO/LONDON/JERUSALEM: The ethics watchdog for Norway’s $1.9 trillion wealth fund is scrutinizing Israeli banks’ practice of underwriting Israeli settlers’ housebuilding commitments in the occupied West Bank in a review that could prompt up to $500 million in divestments.

The Council on Ethics, a public body set up by the Ministry of Finance, has, however, decided not to object to the Fund’s investments in accommodation platforms such as Airbnb that offer rentals in the Jewish settlements.

The body checks that firms in the portfolio of the world’s largest wealth fund meet ethical guidelines set by Norway’s parliament.

In an interview with Reuters on May 22, Council head Svein Richard Brandtzaeg said it was examining how Israeli banks offer guarantees that protect Israeli settlers’ money if the company building their home in the West Bank should fold.

Other practices are also being looked at “but this is what we can see so far,” he said. “That is what is well documented.” He declined to say how long the review would take.

Brandtzaeg did not name the banks but, at the end of 2024, the fund owned about 5 billion crowns ($500 million) in shares in the five largest Israeli lenders, up 62 percent in 12 months, according to the latest data.

The banks — Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, Israel Discount Bank, Mizrahi Tefahot Bank and First International Bank of Israel — did not answer requests for comment.

Since 2020, they have been included in a list of companies with ties to settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories compiled by a UN mission assessing the implications for Palestinian rights.

Latterly, investor concern has grown around the world over a 19-month-old Israeli onslaught that has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and devastated the Gaza Strip in response to an attack by Hamas militants that killed more than 1,200 Israelis.

Around 700,000 Israeli settlers live among 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Many settlements are adjacent to Palestinian areas and some Israeli firms serve both Israelis and Palestinians.
The United Nations’ top court last year found that Israeli settlements built on territory seized in 1967 were illegal, a ruling that Israel called “fundamentally wrong,” citing historical and biblical ties to the land.

ACCOMMODATION RENTALS IN WEST BANK SETTLEMENTS

In mid-2024, the Council on Ethics began a new review of investments linked to the West Bank and Gaza.

It examined 65 companies but recommended only petrol station chain Paz and telecoms company Bezeq for divestment, resulting in share sales.

The Council also scrutinized some multinationals to see if their activities in the West Bank met its guidelines.

Among them were the accommodation platforms, including Airbnb, Booking.com, TripAdviser and Expedia, named on the UN list and accounting for about $3 billion in Fund investments.

But the Council will not recommend watchlisting or divesting from those, Eli Ane Lund, head of its secretariat, said in the joint interview.

“The company’s activity must have some kind of influence on the (ethical) violations,” she said. “It’s not (enough) to have a connection, it has to have something to do with the violation, it must contribute to it.”

The Council’s recommendations go to the central bank, which is not obliged to follow them but generally does.

If investments are sold, it is done gradually to avoid alerting markets, and the decision is then made public.

Pro-Palestinian campaigners say the Council sets its bar too high for recommending divestments, and that the Norwegian government should instruct the fund to conduct a general divestment from Israel just as it did for Russia in 2022, three days after Moscow invaded Ukraine.

But most lawmakers support the Council’s approach, and are set on Wednesday to formally endorse a parliamentary finance committee’s decision not to order a wholesale boycott.


Syrian pro-Assad fighter jailed for life in Germany for crimes against humanity

Updated 03 June 2025
Follow

Syrian pro-Assad fighter jailed for life in Germany for crimes against humanity

BERLIN: A German court on Tuesday convicted a Syrian man of crimes against humanity and jailed him for life over offenses committed during his time fighting for former President Bashar Assad.
The court in the city of Stuttgart found the former militiaman guilty of crimes including murder and torture after a trial which involved testimony from 30 witnesses.
Shortly after the outbreak of anti-Assad protests in early 2011, the man joined a pro-government Shia militia in the southern town of Bosra Al-Sham.
He proceeded to take part in several crimes against the local Sunni population with the aim of “terrorizing” them and driving them from the town, the court found.
German authorities have pursued several suspects for crimes committed in Syria’s civil war under the principle of universal jurisdiction, even after Assad’s ouster last December.
In 2022, former Syrian colonel Anwar Raslan was found guilty of overseeing the murders of 27 people and the torture of 4,000 others at the notorious Al-Khatib jail in 2011 and 2012.
That was the first international trial over state-sponsored torture in Syrian prisons and was hailed as “historic” by human rights activists.


More than 4 million refugees have fled Sudan since war began, UN says

Updated 03 June 2025
Follow

More than 4 million refugees have fled Sudan since war began, UN says

GENEVA: The number of people who have fled Sudan since the beginning of the war has surpassed 4 million, a spokesperson for the UN refugee agency said on Tuesday.
UNHCR spokesperson Eujin Byun told a Geneva press briefing that the milestone was reached on Monday and that the scale of displacement was “putting regional and global stability at stake.”


US to eventually reduce military bases in Syria to one: US envoy

Updated 03 June 2025
Follow

US to eventually reduce military bases in Syria to one: US envoy

ISTANBUL: The United States has begun reducing its military presence in Syria with a view to eventually closing all but one of its bases there, the US envoy for the country has said in an interview.
Six months after the ouster of longtime Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, the United States is steadily drawing down its presence as part of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), a military task force launched in 2014 to fight the Daesh group (IS).
“The reduction of our OIR engagement on a military basis is happening,” the US envoy for Syria, Tom Barrack, said in an interview with Turkiye’s NTV late on Monday.
“We’ve gone from eight bases to five to three. We’ll eventually go to one.”
But he admitted Syria still faced major security challenges under interim leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, whose Islamist-led coalition toppled Assad in December.
Assad’s ouster brought an end to Syria’s bloody 14-year civil war, but the new authorities have struggled to contain recent bouts of sectarian violence.
Barrack, who is also the US ambassador to Turkiye, called for the “integration” of the country’s ethnic and religious groups.
“It’s very tribal still. It’s very difficult to bring it together,” he said.
But “I think that will happen,” he added.
The Pentagon announced in April that the United States would halve its troops in Syria to less than 1,000 in the coming months, saying the IS presence had been reduced to “remnants.”


Gaza officials say Israeli forces killed 27 heading to aid site. Israel says it fired near suspects

Updated 03 June 2025
Follow

Gaza officials say Israeli forces killed 27 heading to aid site. Israel says it fired near suspects

  • UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday condemned the killing of more 30 Palestinians
  • He called for an “immediate and independent investigation” into the incident

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip: Palestinian health officials and witnesses say Israeli forces fired on people as they headed toward an aid distribution site on Tuesday, killing at least 27, in the third such incident in three days.

The army said it fired “near a few individual suspects” who left the designated route, approached its forces and ignored warning shots.

The near-daily shootings have come after an Israeli and US-backed foundation established aid distribution points inside Israeli military zones, a system it says is designed to circumvent Hamas.

The United Nations has rejected the new system, saying it doesn’t address Gaza’s mounting hunger crisis and allows Israel to use aid as a weapon.

The Israeli military said it was looking into reports of casualties on Tuesday.

It previously said it fired warning shots at suspects who approached its forces early Sunday and Monday, when health officials and witnesses said 34 people were killed.

The military denies opening fire on civilians or blocking them from reaching the aid sites.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which operates the sites, says there has been no violence in or around them. On Tuesday,

it acknowledged that the Israeli military was investigating whether civilians were wounded “after moving beyond the designated safe corridor and into a closed military zone,” in an area that was “well beyond our secure distribution site.”

‘Either way we will die’ The shootings all occurred at the Flag Roundabout, around a kilometer (1,000 yards) from one of the GHF’s distribution sites in the now mostly uninhabited southern city of Rafah.

The entire area is an Israeli military zone where journalists have no access outside of army-approved embeds.

At least 27 people were killed early Tuesday, according to Zaher Al-Waheidi, the head of the Gaza Health Ministry’s records department.

Hisham Mhanna, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said its field hospital in Rafah received 184 wounded people, 19 of whom were declared dead on arrival and eight more who later died of their wounds.

The 27 dead were transferred to Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Younis. Yasser Abu Lubda, a 50-year-old displaced Palestinian from Rafah, said the shooting started around 4 a.m. in the city’s Flag Roundabout area, around one kilometer (1,000 yards) away from the aid distribution hub.

He said he saw several people killed or wounded. Neima Al-Aaraj, a woman from Khan Younis, gave a similar account.

“There were many martyrs and wounded,” she said, saying the shooting by Israeli forces was “indiscriminate.”

She said she managed to reach the hub but returned empty-handed.

“There was no aid there,” she said. “After the martyrs and wounded, I won’t return,” she said.

“Either way we will die.” Rasha Al-Nahal, another witness, said “there was gunfire from all directions.”

She said she counted more than a dozen dead and several wounded along the road.

She said she also found no aid when she arrived at the distribution hub, and that Israeli forces “fired at us as we were returning.” 3 Israeli soldiers killed in northern Gaza

The Israeli military meanwhile said Tuesday that three of its soldiers were killed in the Gaza Strip, in what appeared to be the deadliest attack on Israel’s forces since it ended a ceasefire with Hamas in March.

The military said the three soldiers, all in their early 20s, fell during combat in northern Gaza on Monday, without providing details.

Israeli media reported that they were killed in an explosion in the Jabaliya area.

Israel ended the ceasefire in March after Hamas refused to change the agreement to release more hostages sooner.

Israeli strikes have killed thousands of Palestinians since then, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 people hostage in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack into Israel that ignited the war.

They are still holding 58 hostages, a third of them believed to be alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefire agreements or other deals.

Israel’s military campaign has killed over 54,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many of the dead were civilians or combatants.

The ministry is led by medical professionals but reports to the Hamas-run government.

Its toll is seen as generally reliable by UN agencies and independent experts, though Israel has challenged its numbers.

Israel says it has killed around 20,000 militants, without providing evidence. Around 860 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the Oct. 7 attack, including more than 400 during the fighting inside Gaza.