“AI” is a popular topic these days. This series of blogs is a brief introduction to what AI is, why it matters, and ways to help keep you and your information safe.
Artificial Intelligence is a big topic—everything from the algorithms on Netflix and TikTok to Amazon’s shopping recommendations to Google’s new search features to chatbots like ChatGPT is a form of artificial intelligence. But when newspapers and articles talk about AI as a gamechanger, they’re usually talking about something called Generative Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence is the capability of computer systems or algorithms to imitate intelligent human behavior. Generative AI is capable of generating new content (such as images or text) in response to a submitted prompt by learning from a large reference database of examples. What this means is that chatbots and other programs like them have a large collection of labeled information, pulled mostly from the internet and other digital sources, that the program goes through to find a likely answer to a question or prompt you type into it. It recognizes patterns in its collection of data, and mixes pieces of those patterns together to give you a response.
How Does this Affect You?
In some cases, Generative AI and other uses of similar tech are great! It can be used to look through large amounts of medical data to help doctors make diagnoses. It can be used to help people who struggle to write with suggestions for grammar and tone. It can help analyze data for agriculture, climate, and other scientific fields to help scientists discover solutions to some of the world’s big problems.
But AI has risks as well. Generative AI is still just software; it needs people to check its work and find real ways to apply the answers it finds when it sorts through data. Some companies are deciding that it’s cheaper to use AI instead of hiring people for some roles—and some companies that use AI for those roles are finding that you do need people and have hired some of them back.
Most importantly, AI is technology, and it’s being developed quickly and in whatever way tech companies think will work. We’ve yet to see what an AI that meets all the claims the tech companies make, but it is going to keep changing.
For a beginner's overview of the topic, try these books:
Simply Artificial Intelligence
Generative Artificial Intelligence
Nonfiction titles on AI - the good, the bad, and everything in between.
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