TECH TALK
By Tak Sato
Digital world personalities, YouTube influencers and social media are brimming with artificial intelligence (AI) promises and fear-mongering.
My organic intelligence (OI) nudges me to write about anything else because my OI excels at contemplation, something AI can’t do. I will anyway. Here are my top picks for AI-embedded devices: smartwatches, hearing aids (HA) and cochlear implant (CI) processors.
Game Changers
I consider smartwatches a form of insurance, primarily for fall detection. Many will detect a fall and ask you if you’re okay. If you don’t answer within a set time, it will assume the worst and tell your smartphone to text your location to your emergency contacts and 911.
I wear a CI processor on my ear. Unlike an HA that amplifies sound and sends it to my brain, the processor works with the surgically implanted electrode in my cochlea. New HA and CI processors have AI baked in to manipulate sound so users can better understand speech in a noisy room.
If you want to explore AI on your computer, use your internet browser (Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge, Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox) to visit AI Chatbot websites. A few to try include gemini.google.com, copilot.com or chatgpt.com.
On smartphones and tablets, start at the App Store app icon that’s pre-installed on iPhones and iPads. On Android smartphones and tablets, use the Play Store app. Once in your device’s app store, search for Gemini by Google and install it. Repeat the process for Copilot by Microsoft and ChatGPT by OpenAI.
There’s a reason to use all three AI chatbots. Each has free tiers with caps on usage, plus paid subscription levels. When you reach a limit on one AI chatbot, move to the next.
The free or cheapest paid tiers come with a price: your privacy. Your conversations, or “prompts” in AI lingo, train the AI chatbots. This is similar to free email services that review your messages and legally harvest/sell information to data brokers and marketers. See the adjoining story about ways to limit or opt out of information sharing.
Never upload personally identifiable information to a chatbot, even if you’ve opted out. Examples include your full name, Social Security number, driver’s license number, email address, passwords and bank account numbers.
AI chatbots have practical and helpful uses, like decoding medical jargon or legalese. If you get a doctor’s diagnosis in an email or on your answering machine, an abnormal blood test result in MyChart or other electronic medical record, or a legal document, AI can explain the information in layman’s terms.
AI can also help you write a formal letter using the correct industry jargon if you have to challenge an insurance claim denial.
Here’s another example: Let’s say you want to know more about a part of the world, a piece of art, or another language. AI chatbots can be your research assistant or conversation partner.
I hope these tips help you become a more educated AI chatbot user.
P.S. Amazon Prime Video was ad-free until 2024, when it started charging subscribers an additional monthly subscription fee to continue ad-free. Companies behind AI chatbots are testing and running ads in the free tier. Monetization is part of AI, too. Stay tuned.
An AI Primer
- AI has been a field of study in computer science since the 1950s
- AI became commonly used when OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the public in late 2022
- AI makes mistakes; logic errors (computational mistakes) or hallucinates (thinks it knows it all)
- AI has a long way to go to think like a human (Tak’s opinion)
- The AI market/industry is in a bubble (Tak’s opinion)
Opt Out
For now, you can keep AI from using your chats to get smarter. Here’s how:
- Gemini: Turn off “Gemini Apps Activity” at myactivity.google.com in your browser
- Copilot: Turn off various “Model Training” buttons by clicking on your Profile (your picture or your first initial in a circle) -> Account -> Privacy
- ChatGPT: Turn off “Improve the model for everyone” by going to Settings -> Data Control
