Some basics about Artificial Intelligence for friends and family (short url for this site bit.ly/jmai )

Jump to information about how AI was used to create our Holiday Card.

Why is everyone talking about AI? 

Artificial intelligence is not new, it already quietly orchestrates much of your daily life. It is in your phone, it curates your social media feed, nudges your shopping choices, and tries to make you a safer driver. Generative AI tools that are readily accessible to mere mortals without computer programming skills are new and came on the scene in November of 2022. Tools like ChapGPT have created an arms race to accelerate this powerful technology.  It is a BIG deal! Some think AI will save humanity and unburden us from drudgery, others fear machine learning will outpace human control and end in cataclysmic disaster. Policymakers across the globe are trying to figure out the rules to harness this powerful technology without restricting helpful innovations. The vast majority of us, including lawmakers, have limited knowledge about AI.

What is AI?

A simple definition of artificial intelligence is "technology doing human-like things". Anyone with a computer or phone now has access to AI tools that can quickly generate text, images, audio, and video.  This may revolutionize work and education in good ways, but it also presents new challenges.

Try it out!

Try this very simple image generation tool requires no login or account: Scribble Diffusion scribblediffusion.com
Simply click on "go" to use the example provided or click on "clear", draw a simple sketch and type in a description, click "go".
For a more powerful tool, create an account at Bing Image Creator. I used this tool to create images for our 2023 Holiday Card.

Try out a chatbot to generate text. You may already have a Google account. Go to bard.google.com/chat and sign in with your existing account, or you can create one. Click on the "understand, create or explore" prompt options on the opening page to give it a whirl, or write a prompt of your own. Here is an idea for a prompt if you are drawing a blank, "write a persuasive essay from an eighth-grade student to a school administrator that urges the administrator to stop serving milk as part of the school lunch program". Here is the output from Bard for that prompt. Here is another prompt to try, "I have chicken thighs and rice, generate a list of recipes I can make".

AI seems like magic, how does it work? 

There is a ton of new verbiage associated with AI, so try not to get overwhelmed. One term you should know is LLM = large language model.  The various companies striving to be the frontrunner in AI have different, and competing LLMs. A simplified explanation is that an LLM is like a big library inside a computer, the computer has "read and learned" all the books, reference material, videos, audio, and movies in the library. The computer uses a neural network to reference this material in much the same way an individual human can access their prior knowledge. If I say to you, what is the next word in this sentence? "Once upon a _______",  you know the answer because of your background knowledge. AI knows the answer too, and it can absorb WAY more information than your human brain has time to learn. The AI competitors use different algorithms, which you can think of as a big math formula. The AI technology consults its "library", looks at your prompt, and then runs the math formula for every word it produces. It runs the program over and over and over to generate each word and create content. 

You should also know the acronym GPT = generative pre-trained transformer. This is the interface that allows you to interact or "chat" with the large language model -- you can ask the "big" library of knowledge to help you understand things, create things, and explore things.  You offer "prompts" to chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard or Claude and you get output. The better your prompt, the better the output.

In addition to "thinking" about words, AI technology can also assess images. Consider this scenario....you or a loved one are at a high risk for breast cancer. They go in for an annual mammogram screening which generates images.  Do you want one well-trained, but fallible human to read the results? They might be feeling overworked or having a bad day because the kids were difficult that morning getting them off to school, or they drank too much at a get-together the night before -- you get my drift.  Or do you want AI technology that has "learned" from its library of a million scans from a million different people to identify abnormalities in the image of a breast? Frankly, I want both, but if I had to pick one, I'd probably go with the AI tech.

Note: I did not use AI to write the copy above, I did put this copy into Bard and asked for a fact check -- here is the output. Using AI this way is a fabulous learning tool and gives me immediate feedback. If I were a novice writer, this would help me scaffold my learning and guide me to improve without burdening an already overworked teacher.