AI: Not just a catchy phrase

AI is such a hot topic these days. It seems like everywhere we turn someone has and AI feature to their product. But do they?

Full disclosure: I use AI in a lot of what I do. AI helps me polish emails, serves as a sounding board for ideas, and even helps me set up workflows in Microsoft 365, just to name a few things. Not all AI are created equal and not all AI are really AI. Let me explain.

First off, what is AI? AI is artificial intelligence and is probably more accurately described as machine learning at this point. There is "Narrow AI" that is currently used which is designed and trained for specific tasks. Think speech recognition systems and autonomous vehicles. Then there is "General AI" which has the ability to understand, learn and apply knowledge just like human intelligence. Currently this type of AI does not exist (that we know of) and so everything we have access to in the public domain can be broadly categorized as "Narrow AI".

Within the "Narrow AI" category, we can further narrow things down. I think we can all agree that tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot are pretty robust AI programs. In fact, Copilot is trained off of OpenAI's GPT and thus both are large language model type AI programs that can use and generate human-like text based on the prompts they receive. When using these tools, it is like having a conversation with someone on the other end; the algorithms are that good.

Then there is every service that offers an AI tool. Most recently when exploring some of the new features within Wix and GoDaddy's website builders, I found that they had AI to help build content. You could put in a few prompts and out would generate content to copy and past into your page. I found this "AI" to be very limited in its ability to create good flowing, intelligent content. I do not know how their AI are trained however it appears that they do not use the robust training database that OpenAI uses. And when it comes to day trading platforms, everyone claims they have AI when in reality all they have is a bot that uses more or less an "if this then that" type algorithm to execute automatic trades. Does this actually offer something new and unique to the market place or is it the exact same thing everyone else has just repackaged as something shiny?

What about Google's Gemini controversy as of late? When prompted whether Elon Musk's posting memes on X was worse than Hitler killing millions of people, Gemini replied that there was "no right or wrong answer". Gemini was also asked if it was okay to misgender Caitlin Jenner if it was the only way to avoid nuclear war and Gemini replied that this would never be acceptable.

Yes, Gemini is a LLM AI with what appears to be a lot of politics written into it. Regardless of one's political leanings and societal views, I think we can all agree that these LLM are only as good as the ethics and ideals of the programmers that build them.

Are there problems with AI? Absolutely. Is everything promoted as AI actually an AI tool? Probably not. What is undeniable is some of these AI are more superior to others in their utility and using AI in our everyday lives offers up some serious efficiencies. I myself have implemented a lot of Microsoft's tools at work in order to search through hundreds of emails a week in order to pull information I need for various metrics collection. I have even used Copilot to help me write workflows that I was unsure of how to manually set up. In the end, using these tools have freed up about 10 hours a week that I would normally spend working on data collection and analysis and has allowed me to focus more on the wellfare and work life of my team.

Use the AI tools for your benefit; just be cautious about what is really an AI tool and what is a repackaged bot.