Welcome to the Wonderful World of AI!
What is AI?
Simple Definitions
- Artificial intelligence (AI)- an area of computer science and engineering that aims to build intelligent/learning capable computers that have human-like intelligence, judgement, learning, and awareness.
- Generative AI-Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can generate test, images, videos, and other content in response to a user prompt. AI generators can only make content that is based on its training data (what the human programs the AI to know).
- Deep Neural Networks employ many layers of neural networks to deal with complex subjects.
- Large Language model (LLM)- LLMs are text-based AI generators that are "trained" to understand content inputted by a user, and then generate original content. For example, chatbots can respond to user prompts by processing natural language that way that a human would.
- Natural Language Processing refers to a branch of artificial intelligence concerned with giving computers the ability to understand text and spoken word in the same way humans can.
- Prompt(s)- specific input given to a LLM (like ChatGPT), that is inputted by the user. They can be simple and complex, and the quality and specificity of the prompt often influence the quality and relevance of the response from the AI.
Pros of Using Generative AI
- Language Services, Global Communication, and Accessibility: AI offers translation services. This can facilitate communication across language barriers, beneficial in international business and diplomacy.AI can also translate text to speech and vice versa, for those who need it.
- Personalization and Improved User Experience: AI generators have the capability to tailor experiences to individual preferences enhances engagement in marketing, entertainment, and education based on the user. In other words, the AI learns what your individual preferences are, how you communicate with it, and in some cases tailors responses based on your literacy level.
- Efficiency, Productivity, and Innovation: AI can enhance productivity by automating routine tasks and complex computations. AI can be used as a tool to create questions for a test, summarize a book, come up with library program description based on what the user describes in the prompt, and much more.
- Analysis: AI can help provide businesses with market analysis, consumer behavior predictions, and trends. It can also analysis financial data, scientific research, and can help with insights on informed healthcare services.
Cons of Using Generative AI
- Privacy and Data Security: There are concerns about how AI systems use and store private data, and there are issues with how the security of private data is managed and stored.
- Intellectual Property and Ethical Considerations: The use of AI raises intellectual property concerns, and there's a risk of AI being used for unethical purposes, like spreading misinformation, hallucinations being mistaken for valid information, etc.
- Bias and Equity: AI systems are trained on human-generated data and this impacts equity, and accessibility to information based on what AI system the user is using. EX. Since AI generators are trained to understand human language, what languages does the AI have access to?
- Regulatory and Legal Challenges: Laws, guidelines, and regulations about AI and using AI are constantly changing, and it is hard to develop adequate legal and regulatory frameworks to ensure accountability, consumer protection, and fair competition.
- Reliability and Transparency: AI tools, including language models and chatbots, may not generate truthful or reliable answers and often lack the ability to credit the sources of their information, leading to challenges in verifying the accuracy and origin of their responses.
- Hallucinating-the generation of content by a LMMs that is not based on actual data and fact, and could be completely made-up. This is mainly a result of limitations of the training data of that system or the user is prompting the generator with more complicated, imaginative, unrealistic, or nonsensical prompts.