It’s all fun and games until the robot uprising happens and our last hope of survival is Arnold Schwarzenegger – although initially that’s who/what we were running from so that says something right there.
In any case, the artificial intelligence (AI) (machine learning) (robotic cognition) conversation has been going on for a while now – consider for a moment that Isaac Asimov wrote those 3 laws back in 1942 and we’re still following a then-unknown science fiction writer’s musings for our facts. We at Platinum Seed also saw the writing on the virtual wall some years back when we penned an article or two on the subject. You can read those vintage articles here, and here.
In any case, 2023 has seen a massive resurgence of artificial intelligence with ChatGPT being a catalyst for all major tech companies launching their own version or brand of an AI-based user platform.
So, how does it all work? Who has control of this thing? And what does it all mean?! Who knows… but let’s unpack a few things about it anyway.
What is ChatGPT?
The platform that started it all (over again):
ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology, allows users to have human-like conversations with a chatbot. While we have all heard of chatbots by now, original iterations could only supply answers or solutions of predefined data input by the humans, this new language model can answer questions and assist with tasks like writing emails, essays and basic code – it can even write blog articles, just like this one.
Currently open to the public while in its research and feedback-collection phase, a paid subscription version called ChatGPT Plus has been launched and is sure to offer way more ‘opportunities’ in the near future.
And in case you were wondering like we were what the GPT stands for: Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. ChatGPT was not consulted in the research of that question
There’s something to be said for AI research
To be clear, this is not implying there is room to research the world of potential and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence – that’s a given – but rather the opportunity to use it for research.
If one considers that something like ChatGPT uses the internet and its endless avenues of information to formulate its responses to a user’s question, then it’s fair to say that it has taken all of the possible Google results to your question and consolidated them into one succinct result.
Basically, AI is the evolution of search engines, ChatGPT is the new Google.
Think about it; we search for things like ‘How to write a blog article’ and Google serves us about 1 280 000 000 results (in 0,61 seconds), and that’s impressive. Well, it was…
You’re still left with your own research to do off the back of that, while something like ChatGPT gives you the exact steps to take to write a great blog article – literally follow these steps and you’ll be a regular Dickens.
But more than that, change your request to ‘Write me a blog article about AI’ and that’s the job done.
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Are there different types of AI-generated content?
Oh yes, what we’ve touched on so far is only part of the equation, AI-generated content (herein defined as consumable content that has been created by the algorithms of an artificial intelligence) can be so much more, and that’s where things get really interesting – and highly contestable.
The current types of creatable AI media are:
Written
Image (this dog doesn’t actually exist)
Speech
Video (a Ryan Reynolds spin on things)
Music (new age rock for the ages? From 4 years ago!)
Code
Some of the top AI generators at the time of writing this are:
Google AI Platform, TensorFlow, Microsoft Azure, Rainbird, Infosys Nia, Wipro HOLMES, Dialogflow, Premonition, Ayasdi, MindMeld, Meya, KAI, Vital A.I, Wit, Receptiviti, Watson Studio, Lumiata and Infrrd.
In remembering Mr Asimov, this is not quite the beginning, but, this is just the beginning! Commercial Artificial Intelligence (you heard it here first) for the purposes of generating content is everywhere right now and you can’t throw a stick online without hitting something AI-related.
But is it actually just some classic human hype?
Conclusion
More than 80 years after the idea of harnessing artificial intelligence came into mainstream thinking, it still feels like a trend, something interesting for us to fixate on for a while – something for all the big corporations to jump on and create their own version to sell. And then left to die.
Humans have a collective attention span of probably somewhere around a minute in the grand scheme of things – remember the Game of Thrones finale? Us neither.
How long will AI be ruling the roost of topics of digital conversation? Who really knows, but maybe that’s not the question. Commercial Artificial Intelligence (first!), and the content it is capable of creating, is here and will be around and available for the foreseeable future – in which case – hype or not: how do we work with it while keeping the lines clear?
But remember one thing: never anger the robots…
