BEST IELTS General Reading Test 537

Table of Contents

IELTS GENERAL READING TEST 537 – PASSAGE – 3

IELTS GENERAL READING TEST – 537

READING PASSAGE – 3

The Rise of AI

[A] Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for some time. It is revolutionising industry, upping productivity, and altering the shape of technology. All good stuff, you might say, but since November 2022, when ChatGPT burst on the scene, it meant anyone—from CEOs to schoolkids—could use generative AI to solve problems, generate content, and answer questions. The number of users rapidly escalated, and more and more AIs emerged.

Many generate text; some others create images in a range of styles, from colouring books to photographs. A few even create songs or make videos, and AI voice-overs are now so realistic that it is hard to distinguish whether the speaker is a real person or not. While the benefits are remarkable, there is a real fear of AI. Nobody truly believes AI will enslave humanity or that it spells doom for the human race, but there are some legitimate concerns.

IELTS General Reading Test

[B] The most commonly expressed fear is that AI will cause unemployment. AIs can do a wide range of tasks much faster than any human, and they don’t need a salary. Digital giant Getronics thinks that they may alter the way we work, but that concerns are unfounded because many jobs require cognitive abilities that AIs simply don’t possess—and likely never will. While relatively low-level jobs such as data entry might be at risk, the rest of the working population should rest easy in the knowledge that, if anything, AI will help. Maria Wilson, a freelance illustrator, disagrees.

Since the launch of image-creating AIs like Hotpot and Imagine, she has seen a downturn in commissions. “I illustrate children’s books, and a double-page spread can take anything from a few hours to a week. Given the right instructions, an AI can do the same thing in under a minute.” Carla Astley from The Freelancer agrees to a certain extent. “The limitations of AI will be overcome in time, and that means it is inevitable there will be fewer jobs. People will still pay a premium for, say, an original piece of copy—one not written by ChatGPT—but how many firms will pay for that?”

IELTS General Reading Test

[C] Another concern that crops up, particularly on social media, is our inability to differentiate between what is real and what is not. Almost everyone has heard of deepfakes. Most are created in fun, like King Charles doing the samba, but they can be malicious or amount to propaganda, and we’ve seen how fast misinformation can spread online. When stories become more than just comments on Reddit or Twitter because they involve videos of what looks like the president of Ukraine surrendering to Russia or photographs of a bomb exploding in Washington, they are potentially devastating.

Such images, indistinguishable from the real thing, are flooding the internet and are not always labelled ‘AI-generated’ or simply ‘fake’. Washington Post’s recent search of the term “Gaza” on Adobe Stock found several, including emotive images of wounded and frightened children alone in a bombed-out building. Our brains process images 60,000 faster than text—and they create a more lasting impression, no matter if we subsequently learn something isn’t real.

IELTS General Reading Test

[D] There is also a danger inherent in any AI in that it is only as smart as the data it learns from. There are two issues here. The first is that the material it learns from is not representative of the entire human race. Take ChatGPT; it learned from books, websites, research papers and so on, written in English, from primarily American sources. It is automatically aligned with a white, male, middle-class perspective because the sources it learned from were produced by white, male, middle-class people.

Of the millions of books published since antiquity, how many were written by women? Or ethnic minorities? Ask ChatGPT a question and its answer will be coloured by its ‘experiences’. And that leads to the second issue. AIs are constantly learning from what we input into them, which is why there has been a recent furore over AI becoming dumber. In the last two years, users claim that the accuracy and complexity of answers on ChatGPT have declined dramatically.

IELTS General Reading Test

[E] In response to this and many other ethical concerns, a number of groups have established guidelines for the development of AI. Carla Astley welcomes the move but says that governments have to back up voluntary best practices with legislation. The European Union proposed the world’s first comprehensive AI law in 2023, and although various aspects of the law will be applied from 2024, but it won’t be fully operable until 2030.

The USA hasn’t gone that far, but it has introduced a guide for a society that protects people from the threats posed by AI and “uses technologies in ways that reinforce our highest values”. Yet, as Maria Wilson points out, it isn’t law, and it isn’t global. As AI continues to infiltrate almost every aspect of life at an increasingly rapid rate, a new concern will inevitably arise: can the extremely slow wheels of justice turn fast enough to keep up?

IELTS General Reading Test

Questions 28–32

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

i. Ethical Issues

ii. Learning difficulties

iii. Multiple intelligences

iv. A threat to livelihoods

v. An uncertain future

vi. Vulnerability to Al truth

vii. The reach of Al

viii. The Al explosion

IELTS General Reading Test

28. Paragraph A

29. Paragraph B

30. Paragraph C

31. Paragraph D

32. Paragraph E

IELTS General Reading Test

Questions 33 to 36

Choose the correct letter.

33. According to the text, no-one thinks AIs will…

A. become dumber.

B. be unbiased.

C. dominate humankind.

D. be regulated.

34. According to Getronics,…

A. humans are largely irreplaceable.

B. moral issues do not outweigh AI’s usefulness.

C. workplaces are unlikely to change because of AI.

D. AIs are only as effective as the data they learn from.

IELTS General Reading Test

35. Maria Wilson fears that…

A. US legislation to protect us from AI is wrong.

B. she will be unable to keep up with AI.

C. the way she works will have to change.

D. she will be made redundant.

36. The author thinks AI’s visual creations…

A. save considerable time.

B. should be clearly labelled.

C. can spark armed conflict.

D. need better laws to avoid confusion.

IELTS General Reading Test

Questions 37–40

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each gap.

Since its introduction, AI has transformed various industries by enhancing 37………… and reshaping technology, with its capabilities expanding from text generation to creating realistic voice-overs, although it also raises significant concerns despite its 38………… One major fear is its impact on jobs. Another is the ability of AI to generate fake visual content in light of the way we 39………… and the rapidity with which misinformation spreads.

AIs are also subject to bias and diminishing accuracy because the data we input into them come from limited 40………… Efforts to address such concerns through legislation are laudable, but it is doubtful that the law can keep up with technology.

IELTS General Reading Test

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