TECH TALK
Get Smart with Artificial Intelligence
By Tak Sato
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Professor Toshinori Munakata come to mind when I read articles on artificial intelligence or AI.
The 1984 sci-fi movie “The Terminator” starring Schwarzenegger, although purely entertainment, made me aware of AI’s dark potential, which was interesting for a young geek like me. At Cleveland State University, I took Dr. Munakata’s AI class to learn about it.
Computer science has many fields, with areas cross-pollinating to other disciplines. AI is an example. Simply put, AI enables machines to have human-like intelligence to perform tasks. The process known as “technology transfer” takes information from places like university research laboratories and moves it to businesses that then create new products and services that eventually become available to consumers–us.
Using AI
AI commercialization includes both paid and free services. Search engines like Google make the bottomless knowledge within the internet (the cloud) accessible to consumers. With the amount of knowledge that is in the cloud, it is impossible for a person to instantly direct you to what you seek; computers using AI make that same information available within seconds.
As an aside, free services usually have strings attached, collecting your data as you use an AI app, and gathering information about the sites you visit, your interests, the products you buy, and other valuable details. This data-gathering can result in an influx of unwanted emails, text messages and voicemails, usually wanting to sell something.
Earlier this year, innovation surrounding the “generative AI” category has leapfrogged, creating new opportunities and headaches. Regenerative AI accepts user commands to produce words, art, music and images.
For example, telling a generative AI service to “write an essay on George Washington at middle school-level English” will create a grammar-perfect essay. You can guess the headache AI creates for teachers; who needs homework hotlines anymore?
I mused in another column that I may be on the street when generative AI writes my Tech Talk 🤣 I’m sure you’ve heard about ChatGPT and OpenAI in the news (product and company respectively). Google and Microsoft continuously supercharge their search engines with AI enhancements so your results are more relevant to your search keywords.
To compete with OpenAI, Google has christened Bard, a conversational AI tool similar to ChatGPT. I predict that Bard will become fully integrated into Google’s search engine instead of remaining a standalone service/app because Google’s core business relates to finding information.
Another practical AI category is called Natural Language Processing, or NLP for short, that enables our devices, such as smartphones, to understand, process and generate speech. Although I have benefited from dictating instead of typing on the dinky keyboard on my smartphone for at least a decade, when I was deaf for about 14 months, the NLP of the apps I used to transcribe speech for me to read so I could carry on a conversation with a hearing person was wonderful.
Scammers are using advances in AI to clone voices that potential victims are familiar with to make their scams more convincing. My rule of thumb is never to answer unsolicited calls. To avoid scams, only call back using a number you know.
There are more categories of AI research than what I’ve described. As in anything good for humankind, bad actors also have access to the same AI tools as the rest of us. We need to make sure AI is applied ethically and legally as it grows in popularity.
As Schwarzenegger says in his “Terminator” sequel, “Hasta la vista, baby!” Look for another Tech Talk column about AI in 2024.
