20/05/2023
The last few months we’ve seen huge leaps in the communications space...
People who only ever referenced in relation to doomsday movie scenes (terminator RL coming at ya!), are now using large language models such as Chat GPT in their everyday lives.
These tools are changing the way that we live, work and engage with the information around us. If you’re not already using them, you will be soon, as advancements rapidly extend to all industries and areas.
I know we've seen lots of advancements and fads in recent years, but this wave of tech innovation is different. As I explain it to Kai (13) and Lyrik (10), we now have a (user friendly) version of Minecraft for real life...
Our thoughts and ideas can instantaneously be actioned with the help of these machines. With minimal prompting we can now do things such as:
👾Content Creation: Generate written content such as articles, blog posts, poetry, and stories. Generate imagery (images, video, presentations), only limited by your imagination and descriptions.
👾Digital Tutoring: Giving explanations and support on a wide range of subjects. Create tutors that output answers appropriate for different kids, ages, and subjects. With Kai, the question is no longer ‘what do you know?’, the question I pose to him now is ‘what don’t you know?, what don’t you understand?’.
👾Virtual Assistance: Providing information, scheduling tasks, and answering questions is now easy with AI. Calendar and email integrations are rapidly improving and soon, I believe Susannah Birch's theory of future individualised AI assistants for all, will be the norm.
👾Customer Service: Many businesses are using these tools for automated customer service. They can handle a variety of customer queries, provide troubleshooting steps, and direct customers to human operators when necessary. It’s not ‘typical’ chatbot stuff like we’ve come to know with FB message enquiry interactions (ie. click here to learn more, click here to view our address), it’s now conversational customer service that can adapt and respond based on far more complex interactions.
👾Translation and Language Learning: LLMs can be used for translating text between languages and for language learning, by providing practice conversations and explanations about language use.
👾Coding: You can receive help with coding problems by generating code snippets or explaining programming concepts. You can request the code to be written in particular languages, and you can troubleshoot it with two-way interaction.
👾Entertainment: It’s not all serious, there’s so much that can be done now for entertainment and creativity purposes, such as playing text-based games, generating jokes, or creating fictional stories. I’ve created chatbots that end every enquiry with a Dad Joke. I’m contemplating a conspiracy theory one (focused on AI overlord themes of course)
👾Brainstorming and Idea Generation: We now have amazing tools for brainstorming, offering new ideas or helping to develop existing ones. Writers block isn’t going to be a huge thing anymore, when we can simply rewrite or expand on concepts.
👾Research and Data Analysis: Summarising large documents, extracting key information, or even generating hypotheses based on given data can be done with ease now. You don’t have to trawl through excel sheets or spend ten minutes using ctrl+F to find the information you want.
Would you believe, this is just touching the service of what these models can do? And, in the grand scheme of all things AI, these are still considered BASIC generation tasks. I am both terrified and excited at the possibilities that these advancements offer us.
And I don’t know about you, but the rapid rate of adoption and innovation is moving too quickly for me to keep track of on my own.
These last few months I have relied on the clever people around me to keep me up to date, and as such, I have come to really value collaboration and community as I grapple with how this will change my work, and my world.
So, I thought it would be cool to start a community where we can stay abreast of issues and development, in a way that isn’t too ‘techy’ or confusing.
The Australian AI Group is where I’ve (VERY) recently started that community, and I thought I'd extend the invitation to anyone else interested.
Last week I gave an ‘Introduction to Chat GPT’ in my workplace that I’ll be reposting in the group later this week. It would be a good place to begin your AI learning journey if you don't know where to start.
Join the group here: https://bit.ly/AustralianAIGroup
