Categories: BigData

Comedian/journalist John Oliver has posted the best introduction to artificial intelligence (ChatGPT and relatives) that I know of. If you’re looking to explain to anyone what AI is, and what the pros/cons are, I can strongly recommend this Youtube video. Well, assuming they don’t mind a few rather rude words..

The only thing that I would add is: Artificial Intelligence is a misleading name. All that we have so far are systems which do pattern recognition and prediction - ie fancy versions of text-autocomplete as found in web-pages and mobile phones. ChatGPT, the current fancy thing is doing nothing else: given a starting question or command, it just searches the data it was originally fed with to find the best matching sentence, then the next one, and so forth. There is zero originality, and no deep understanding. That does make it useful for writing superficial book-reviews (as long as its input had similar reviews of similar topics), generating news reports about events (as long as its input has similar reports of similar events), etc. It may even be useful for preparing legal documents which follow a standard pattern. But it’s also possible for it to “lose the thread” and go off on a tangent. And the greatest level of creativity it is capable of is to combine its inputs in new ways - a “collage” of other people’s ideas.