Tech Questions? Get the Answers: 3/22/2023

Q: What is Artificial Intelligence?

A: Artificial Intelligence, or AI is a hot topic in the news recently. In fact, last week’s Tech Question column was written by a powerful new AI platform called ChatGPT which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Before anyone goes bananas and hides in their bunker from the robot uprising, that sort of thing is not happening…yet. AI has been around for a while, in fact the first presentation of AI was given at a conference in 1956, so it is not a question of if we now have AI, but rather what is a specific program made to do.

A major milestone year for AI was 1997 when the computer system Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Gary Kasperov and Dragon Systems released its spoken word recognition system for Windows. However, you couldn’t ask Deep Blue to interpret speech, nor Dragon Systems to play chess (hardly world domination material). Artificial Intelligence has been incorporated into many aspects of our lives in ways that make things easier for us. Cameras can track faces in order to keep them in focus, your phone camera can identify your face from others to give you access while staying locked for all others. Video game characters react differently depending on how you play the game, and you can order pink bunny slippers with the sound of your voice and have them delivered to your door.

Moore’s Law states that computing power and memory doubles every two years, and has allowed increasingly complex programs to be written. Since 1997, great gains have been made in part because of this trend. AI art generators have been gaining popularity for the past few years. ChatGPT is a system that has access to, and can interpret the information on the internet. Imagine the internet had a friendly customer service representative at your disposal. You can ask it nearly anything. It can write you a short story, a birthday card greeting, or tell you the history of the fall of the Roman Empire. However, it was written with some limitations; it only has access to information up to September of 2021, so you can’t ask it if the local pizza place is open today (I tried that one).

It has also been programmed with ethical limitations. I asked ChatGPT what its ethical limitations are. It responded, “As an AI language model, I do not have personal ethical beliefs or values. However, my responses are generated based on the data and patterns found in the text that I was trained on. To ensure that my responses are ethical, I was designed to avoid harmful, hateful, or discriminatory language. Additionally, I am programmed to follow ethical guidelines and principles such as respecting human rights, protecting user privacy, and avoiding promoting misinformation or harmful content. However, it’s important to note that my responses may not always be perfect or accurate. In some cases, I may generate responses that are unintentionally biased, inappropriate, or misleading. It’s up to the user to critically evaluate and verify the information provided by me.”