Could AI help to save Germany’s economy? | BBC News

welcome to AI decoded we're going to take you on the road this week a few weeks ago Stephanie hair who is with me in the studio said after one of our programs that we focus a lot of our attention on development here in the UK and in the United States but what about artificial intelligence in Germany the PowerHouse of European manufacturing what are they doing on artificial intelligence so she's been to find out welcome welcome what did you discover so many things that I cannot wait to show our audience uh we talk to people in

government we talk to doctors scientists researchers and artists we've got a beautiful show ahead that's going to really take you behind the scenes of what's going on in Germany with AI let's take a [Music] look gray skies over Berlin A fitting backdrop for Germany as a whole only two weeks ago its coalition government collapsed its economy is stuttering core Industries like car manufacturing are under threat from competition abroad could artificial intelligence get Europe's most powerful economy back on [Music] track welcome to the first episode of artificial intelligence decoded set in Berlin Germany it's the 35th

anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall and we're here at the falling wall science Summit looking at a gathering of some of the world's greatest experts on artificial [Music] intelligence the summit has attracted Europe's brightest Minds in science and technology founder Sebastian Turner hopes they will build Bridges and break barriers this weekend actually November 9th is the day the Berlin Wall came down and uh this historic date uh raised the question in particular for those who never expected the Berlin Wall to come down which are the next walls to come [Music] down one of

those people breaking barriers years is Richard soer whose pioneering Research into prompt engineering led to the explosion of generative [Music] AI if you could make Germany one of the best countries in the world to do AI what needs to change yeah I've actually been asked that exact question by the German Chancellor and the previous Chancellor you have to start early on in high school after English which is hard to avoid at this point you got to know how to speak English after that the second foreign language you should study should be python because if you

don't understand programming it's very hard to participate constructively and actively in the future AI is also ultimately a program um second it's very hard and painful to fail period even in Silicon Valley it sucks if your company doesn't work right it's very very stressful but at least in Silicon Valley if you do fail a lot of people said well you tried something really ambitious and we're okay helping you succeed and try to succeed another time it's culturally very painful and legally very very painful to fail in Germany then there's just not enough of a VC

ecosystem Venture Capital ecosystem in Germany it's a little bit better in the UK but also like overall in Europe compared to just Silicon Valley it's it's very underdeveloped then there's a not invented here mentality in large German companies where they say oh this little startup we could build this ourselves and of course in theory Google Amazon and Facebook Mana could build any startup right like but in practice even those big us companies are buying a lot of smaller companies and it helps them it helps them to innovate faster it helps them to get to go

to market faster it helps them to bring Young new ideas into the company and then overall be more competitive in the market and so that also isn't very strong in Europe the bureaucracy of starting companies is also just too much I think it needs to be continuously reduced as you're a small and smaller company I think there needs to be less regulation and then once you're really like you found your product Market fit and you could become profitable then you can start to regulate maybe more so while Germany may need to make some changes to

make the most of AI it can also play to its strengths I asked un celik a berlin-based researcher what he thinks is the most promising sector it's definitely going to be healthare but Germany still has a very stronghold on Healthcare Systems so like all these big research institutes like shite and they are investing a lot in ourd in AI [Music] systems so I'm very lucky to be speaking to you today from the heart center of the shite Hospital in this unit we have some patients who are in a very serious and unstable condition and the

doctors are using a new form of Technology based on artificial intelligence to monitor the two biggest risks that can happen after surgery we're going to go behind the scenes and talk with a clinician one of the heart doctors here who's using artificial intelligence to monitor those risks and try to catch them early so we can maximize the benefits of patient care we are using AI as an additional surveillance tool to monitor our patients for two very um common and significant post-operative complication if we identify these complications early that we are able to intervene and then

maybe um maybe change the course of the disease so that we can have our patients in the best possible way and I see you've got a big machine behind you can we come over and take a look at it through of course after you okay thank you so what you can see here is the user interface and um here here we see um the raw input data in this case vital value such as heart rate or systolic blood pressure or the temperature of the patient here we see some um selected laboratory values and of course

we also see um the trends and um the dynamic change for these values right and this is all with live real time data yes and now the probability for postoperative bleeding is estimated to be 1% so it's really low in this also um makes sense if we examine the patient and we can also see here um the trend over the last two hours so we were starting at 25% which is getting better yes this is um The View we get for postoperative renal failure okay and what we can see here is um that we were

starting at 7 74% which is reasonably high and then um we have a declining Trend which is reassuring for us but um the risk is still still estimated to be 25% what we doing is with this algorithm we try to um identify those patients who are at a very high risk of these complications but we also try to identify those patients who are very unlikely to experience those complications and have you any data on how accurate the algorithm is compared to human doctors there was a big um scientific study that showed that um these algorithms

um performed better than um Regular doctors so who invented this AI tool meet Professor Alexander Meer to be able to work with data is like a superpower everything seems to be more easy afterwards because we have time we look at all data in a cal environment and very often we have to ask ourselves the question why did we miss it because there were clear signatures within the data that something would happen here at the sh everybody saw the potential people came offered me their help and I had here also the funding opportunities to realize all

projects so we could use technology to actually solve and address a clinical need so it was not technology looking for a problem but a problem we're looking for technology to solve it and AI was here to help we are witnessing in very exciting time in in the AI space we came from image processing using convolutional neural networks which is a special type of neural network or artificial intelligence to catch patterns within images or videos and we all know this uh and use it daily when we use our smartphone or we also use it in in

the hospital for radiology and now we just witnessed two years ago the Advent of generative AI so now we see AI is producing something meaningful and we are just starting to to use this in the clinical work AI will augment medicine and will will increase the operational efficiency and will uh increase patient safety and will enable better outcomes and in the end there will always be Physicians AI is an instrument such as the CT is an instrument so I will enable us to have better better Precision in our decisions and to be more um more

focused on prevention and the correct therapies Healthcare is a strength for Germany but what about the rest of its economy we ask the new Minister for Education and Research the car was invented in Germany the bike was invented in Germany many more products but we're losing grounds because when you're economically successful you get arrogant you think you know nothing can happen to us and we see now how vulnerable we are so therefore it is extremely important that we have a more science friendly environment that we have a more business friendly environment that Innovations take place

in this country many startups had their starting point here but when it comes to money to grow we're not unfortunately a very risk friendly country and that has to change and then children need to have access to technology need to have access to an iPad need to know something about artificial intelligence they need to know something about the algorithms they need to some know something about where to get the news from yeah how to critically read who is behind that what is the intention where is the source and if you don't know this you haven't

finished school in my opinion wow you had some extraordinary access I'm to people always ask me how does this really appertain to our everyday lives and when you look at the filming in the hospital that's where it's really making a difference but here's the thing we've talked about it as a competition in fact Tony Blair former prime minister said we really need to get going because this is a global competition and we need to be first how do we compare from what you've seen because you said to me initially I don't know what Germany's doing

how do you think having been there now we can to our biggest European competitor so I think it's a cultural question some countries want to be first but some countries want to be the best and I think Germany probably falls into the latter category trust is really important in Germany so they don't want to roll something out particularly in a hospital setting unless it is trustworthy so it's not about taking a cautious approach it's about a trust is it also about fear of failure as well that that one of your contributors I think probably in

terms of the investment V the VC eco EOS system space and culturally yes there is that and that's probably linked with when we put something out we want it to be you know gold standard it's amazing isn't it how culture actually applies to to what we're doing here in this futuristic environment and culture really does play a big part of it listen we'll take a short break the other side of the break we're going to talk about how the Germans are applying AI to the visual arts so often we are told that artificial intelligence is

statistics on steroid in other words it's just really intense mathematics but how do you apply that to the visual arts how are the Germans applying it to music to Art to visual things that that I think a lot of people recognize when it comes to AI so Berlin has always been this magnet for creatives what I loved about this and what you're about to see is people are using AI as a tool as a collaborator and it raises that question of when does AI become an artist so let's take a look so we're here in

Berlin walking along the east side Gallery this is the one of the remnant of the Berlin Wall we just came from the falling wall science Summit where we were looking at how researchers and scientists are using AI to break down walls in the scientific process now we're going to go and visit two Berlin based creatives Matt dryhurst and Phil Langer to see how they're using AI to Break Down The Walls of their creative person process generative AI is transforming images and video creating a new art of the possible for some these images provoke curiosity and

wonder but for others they can feel unsettling and weird Phil Langer is a creative working at the Cutting Edge of what AI can achieve visually so talk us through how you would at least start so I would need in the beginning I would need like several image of that person the more images the better basically um ideally also like in different uh different light and different angles MH you put this in this I'm using mid Journey here for example and and then you have this this prompt that kind of pushes of course the eye in

the direction that you want so a prompt is like a phrase or a set of instructions exactly so prompt kind of tells the AI um what um yeah what you want to have this it's the recipe for basically the result okay and it is also a little bit might be like also the recipe of like the creatives of the future I guess um because of course it's very easy to recreate these images um somewhat but if you want to be very specific you need also very specific prompts this the art of prompt the art of

prompt might be the future exactly and I would just say I kind of describe what we want to see I want like a a highbrid image of an elegant woman and a cat in front of gray background and and I would adjust it to like brunette hair and uh like brown eyes and I would just adjust certain parts of the same prompt for different animals okay so you're already telling it this is what I want the output to look like exactly yeah and then it's almost like a child that you're having to to correct it

it'll give you versions of it and you'll be like more this less this getting closer not still too far exctly you have to kind of steer these results what I said before with curating you get like somewh random results and then uh some of them are more human-like some more like animal likee and you kind of steer the direction you say like let's continue with this image and yeah com adjust the prompt you see something doesn't work quite right with the eyes or with the hair you adjust the prompt in a way that it works

better do people feel emotion do you think when they look at an AI generated image I think it's a mix because they are very beautiful images and they're nice to look at but they have this uncanniness you kind of don't know is this real or not and I think this mix of uh like beautiful image to like kind of like disturbing images when they come together it's kind of like an impactful image and that makes them kind of complicated but also like impactful I think young people also now like children not children but people of

the younger generation I think they already questioning the reality of these images that are out there of this content right I think um it goes like even in politics or culture or whatever it is I think our generation is different in that respect that we we always assume stuff is real like like you said we grew up in an era where we saw a photo or video you assumed it would be undoctored also in the news but I think nowadays young people are always kind of thinking this might be already generated or manipulated in a

way and that's going to be even more in the [Music] future every day it feels like a new question I don't have the answer to but maybe life isn't about having answers maybe it's just about being curious enough to keep asking I always thought when our life would make more sense do you see there being being any danger of losing the skills and the training that people like you had when you were coming up in your career if somebody can just Leap Frog all of that and go straight into using these yeah yeah I think

it's just very important to work with these tools I think it's uh they're kind of like when you have a creative thought the time is now that between the creative thought and executing this idea is like gone to zero now with these tools and that's kind what makes us so powerful like you don't have to have a a long skill set a long experience with the with very complicated software tools uh you can just basically technically just type it in and you have a result that you want um but because everybody can do this now

um it I think there's going to be a flood of content out there of AI generated creatives right so I think to stand out creativity is even more important than it was before so are you an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to AI um I don't know I don't neither hybrid you're creative I know yeah either way you're going to have fun with it yeah I guess hello hello hey Matt dryhurst and Holly hearnen are stars of the art World their new show at the serpentine Gallery in London brings together choirs from across

the United Kingdom to create a groundbreaking art form a meeting of humans and AI through music we're visiting their Berlin Studio to find out how it works the actual sand of AI to us is the sand of fans um our studio often sounds like it's about to take off just the all the cooling uh necessary and so actually someone Andrew in the studio came up with the idea of uh figuring out how to alter the fans so the speed that the fans turn in order to have them play music acoustically Jerry rigged a bunch of

smaller fans be able to show us how you got them to make exactly notes exactly and for some reason only two of them are working right now but they can play exactly so it's we wrote a song book explicitly for AI training uh the idea being that um if you sing the book from start to finish you will have covered the full range of the English fonetic language in order to be able to contribute your voice to an a model um yeah so the the song book itself was inspired by old kind of like renaissance

music and Sacred Heart music from the American South which actually has this kind of diasporic relationship with English folk music we took that book uh throughout the UK recorded 15 choirs who volunteered their voices toward a large data set that we then Ed to train an AI model and so when you go um to the show you'll be able to see every stage of the creation of this model here its inputs and its outputs and some of the music that led to the uh song book itself and so the 15 choirs own their voices they

own the recordings we actually have to negotiate with them to use them for our show which is consistent with the principle um yeah and so then uh uh they basically have a protocol that's put in place for them to be able to expand the trust and maybe value that data and the reason we did it is because there's not really many examples right now of people proactively finding ways for people to co-own and govern their data there this big open question of like you know what to do with people scraping the internet what to do

with your likeness uh uh in these AI models and so we're like okay this is an opportunity for us to set some precedent of saying you can actually do this slightly [Music] differently I will still desire to go into a room and hear someone sing beautifully just none of this changes any of that and if someone wants to reject all these tools and just sing beautifully then i' love that they will do that you know so why are these two artists based in Berlin and not Silicon Valley I think that um Silicon Valley generally is

its best PR engine a lot of this work is happening there and a lot of the work is not uh for for instance on um sound based works a lot of the the researchers we've worked with have been Catal like in Barcelona uh some of the best researchers for sound are based in Europe um when it comes to the image model space what characterizes AI image models is they were pretty much all built in Germany on data sets curated in Germany if you are training kind of like worldclass scientists or remark able artist or whoever

it might mean and ultimately they have to leave to the United States in order to realize uh their Ambitions uh that's a problem you want Clarity in order to be able to assume risk right because you can go and I've known of people who do this and they hire 50 people and then they like have to shut shop because it turns out that they were out of bands on certain uh on certain things so regulation is good there will always be a desire for somebody who's really good at telling a story or who's in person

with people right I mean actually the value of this source of truth or whatever is becomes even more important arguably in a time where it's really difficult to discern the provence of information because there's a bot somewhere in the middle you know Gathering different people to coordinate to accomplish something because fundamentally particularly when you're dealing with large AI models a flux a chat GPT you're looking at kind of the aggregate input of all of us together like it's it's us in aggregate coordinated by algebra so what's holding people back from really engaging with ar arcial

intelligence it becomes somewhat fashionable in more Urbane kind of circles to show incuriosity which is really odd that that's like new for me coming from the Arts but the last 5 10 years I think there's been a lot of backlash about tech a lot of kind of like caricatures some of which are qualified but like a lot of caricatures of tech and I think that that's the only thing I worry about is that people might be encouraged to be incurious about this stuff they're turned off rather than turned on yeah exactly you a social stigma

starts to be generated around it right like the tech Bros and and this kind of language ultimately I just don't think it helps anybody not to say that people who are you know there are many people who are critical of tech who I think are very well qualified in their in their criticisms but but it's more just a you don't want to see a curiosity Gap emerge I'm so glad you went I've learned so much tonight most of all that you look great as a cat um but um in terms of um just taking two

elements of that one is is Phil who you were creating chimeras with um he says that he is a creative so he he it's not just put in a code and it produces it for you it seems that he's working with that and it evolves yeah there's an iterative process which is interesting because Matt and Holly's art program is called the call which is like like prompt engineering you type it you write a call and the Machine responds just like in call and response choirs so the parallels between human activity and human machine activity are

clear so long as people engage because he's saying what we've got now in the visual art World these people who really are engaging and people who are incurious or turned off by it yeah I don't even know if that's committed to the art world I think that's kind of all of us and that's why we need to get out of just looking at Silicon Valley uh or the US China Tech race we want to look at all countries around the world and how they're engaging with AI That's where the Curiosity Gap can be closed they're

each doing something different with it and it's so inspiring what about your curiosity because you were desperate to go to Germany yeah now you've come back your views uh I've never been as inspired by uses of AI as I have been seeing it used in Germany so thank you to all of our friends in Germany for that uh and it's made me want to go and do this for other countries so look out France and look out everybody else we're coming for you you taking the camera yeah okay well look forward to that Stephanie it's

always a pleasure thank you very much that's it for this week our thanks to Stephanie just a reminder that if you are enjoying the AI decoded series then all the previous editions are on our YouTube site so do have a look at that let's do it again same time next week thanks for watching