This is my first ever article on AI published in the second quarterly edition of global e-zine Reader’s choice magazine.Thanks to its editor Kainaz Juzzawalla for inviting and accepting the submission.https://heyzine.com/flip-book/e2f3464286.html

When I heard of AI ie. Artificial Intelligence I got curious and wanting to know more about it, agreed to sign up as a consultant to a startup developing AI tools for a consumer complaint project. However, I saw myself lost in a maze of hundreds of tools, variants and so on and so forth and that’s when I said quits. I needed to learn about it more systematically.

AI appeared all sugary sweet – the fact that when I buy a book from amazon or from any online commerce site, the list of books that popped up as recommendation for similar genre books was AI sent ruffles through my skin. Our favourite dresses, bags, groceries, and the whole range of pretty things that we buy online or the movies we watch had tens of recommendations pointing to us, making up for what our eyes missed the first time while clicking that button of buy or play was AI.

AI was the best of friends. It was nothing short of an amazement that the math behind AI was clever enough to know our likes and dislikes, our preferences, and rejections to say the least. Did it not feel mindboggling when writing an email, a text showed up to complete the sentence or while writing WhatsApp texts messages it corrected the spellings and suggested message completion options.

Generative AI

This seemingly working behind the scenes sort of a soft AI took on a new dimension, a humongous one with appearance of ChatGPT in Nov 2022 which overnight grew to become a buzzword. ChatGPT is a generative AI – GenAI which could prove its capabilities beyond one’s comprehension and imagination. Some users are marvelling its capabilities to making true of a science fiction concept. You try posing any question in any realm, and it comes up with a long answer about which you would never have bothered to scratch your head.

Wouldn’t you be taken aback to see your computer producing an image of a person very accurately with input of just a voice clip of the person. This tech can be like a human assistant to a blind person, or a mentor to a novice cook helping with tips on a recipe or better cooking as she cooks in real time.

These are just small precursors to the infinite possibilities of the Generative AI which can touch human lives in any possible way. However, as good as it might sound it has its flip sides too. An AI techie expert recalled how on meeting an old-time friend after a long gap, the friend took a step back with a startled expression, “Isn’t AI scary?”

Gen AI scary?

I am also fearful of ChatGPT. I don’t doubt its ability to write a good story but what if it types out a novel better than what I can write. I simply can’t accept the fact that a machine can think and do a literary work better than me, a human. Where then that places me in the world of literature, undeniably a tough field where I might struggle my entire life trying to find a niche and create a space for myself. Not to mention least about another “scary” side of GenAI thing is the recent jitters among the denizens when news of deepfakes floated around the world. Hallucinations as we know occurs in human but what is hallucinations in Generative AI. To answer this intrigue let us look at how the AI machine works.

machine learning

AI or GenAI is the result of how you train your machine by feeding it in with lots of information in the form of a tabular data and based on its training how it predicts the result for another set of similar data. Recall that aunt in our neighbourhood who kept information about everyone in the neighbours’ families and given an opportunity to speak would blabber out a lot more information, some good and sometimes not so good to the point of annoyance to the listener. So, if our dear Gen AI machine utters something not so good(erroneous) then it is hallucinating.

The technology Revolution

The power of AI is said to have made its highest mark in 2017 when the world champion Lee Sedol of Go play a highly intuitive human game lost to AI. It is all the marriage of multiple technologies around us that has brought us to this day when we fear of losing to AI. But we should rest assured that the new technologies were invented by human brain too and AI can never match that ability of human brain.