A picture of ROK, the AI from Airplane 2
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What is AI?

There are many definitions flying around for Artificial Intelligence (AI) right now but the best one I’ve found is this:

The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

The definition of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ from Oxford Languages

It’s a tool to simulate or replicate tasks that a human would otherwise do. It would also perform that task significantly quicker and/or better than any human could. But does it actually do that?

Gimmicks of the ages

Just over 10 years ago the company I was working for at the time got very excited about ‘Cloud Computing’. Every new product was cloud-based, had a cloud-themed name, and had marketing covered in pictures of clouds. The thing is however none of the products we’d started offering were new. They were all still running in the same data-centres they were before. Only now people were excited about the branding.

What has this got to do with AI? Well, go and have a look at that definition again and tell me you haven’t used, or at least seen, a product that does any/all of those things before.

Mainstream AI

As of writing this, I’ve yet to use any AI tool that is truly intelligent. I’ve yet to see an AI tool that truly solves a problem that hadn’t already been solved. What I have seen is many vendors use it as a major selling point of their new product. I’ve been suckered into this myself. I upgrade my Samsung phone early to the new S24 Ultra because of ‘Galaxy AI’. What does Galaxy AI do right now I hear you ask? It can translate conversations (exactly like Google Translate has for years), it can do image recognition (see 1000 other apps), and it can remove objects from photos (another thing that’s been around for years). The one ‘AI’ thing it can do is generate pretty average looking wallpapers. How many times have I used these features? Precisely once on day 1 of using the phone.

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Now we have the new Co-Pilot + PCs; a computer with AI tools front and centre. There’s not a huge amount of info out there right now about how this is going to in any way improve on the standard Windows 11 experience – an experience that already has Co-Pilot built in. There is however a lot of information about this…

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MalwareBytes Twitter post on Microsoft Recall

Did anyone ask for this? What has this got to do with AI? Are vendors just using AI features as a way to further encroach on our privacy?

Learn how to manage Windows AI features in Windows in my recent post.

So what actually is AI right now?

Is an Amazon Echo or Google Nest device AI? By the aforementioned definition, sort of. In my mind? No. They mostly just respond to a question with a pre-created answer, and if they don’t have it they’ll try (often unsuccessfully) to pull something from a search Engine.

The most commonly used right AI tools now are Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. So let’s ask ChatGPT how it works. I’ve entered the prompt ‘In 3 sentences or less tell me how you generate text’ and got this…

I generate text using a neural network, a statistical tool trained on a diverse dataset of text from the internet. The model predicts the next word in a sentence based on the input it receives, iteratively constructing sentences and paragraphs. This process relies on patterns and structures learned during training to produce coherent and contextually relevant text.

ChatGPT on ChatGPT

In simple terms it puts sentences and paragraphs together by putting the statistically most likely word first, followed by the most likely word to follow that, and continues until it has finished outputting all of the statistically most likely information to be within the answer. Don’t get me wrong this is an incredible feat of engineering but for me it falls short well short of the functionality I want to see from AI.

What next?

As you can probably tell I’m a little underwhelmed so far, but I do see some upsides and a huge amount of potential for the future. I personally use Google Gemini, Claude.ai, and Bing for a variety of different personal and work-related tasks. They’re all very useful for text, image, and even audio generation. I’ve used Gemini extensively to help me build out a world for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign (Note: check out my IT roles as DND classes post!). I’ve used Claude.ai to help build templates for IT policy documents. Bing is great for generating images, albeit often unintentionally hilarious ones. My personal favourite right now is Suno where you can generate full songs in any style with your own or AI generated lyrics. Here’s one I asked it to make about AI.

None of these are going to change the world particularly, but they are good building blocks for progression. Speaking of which, the latest GPT release, GPT-4o, is starting to move closer to something resembling the AI many of us have been sold in movies over the ages. J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man, Skynet from Terminator, and of course ROK from Airplane II.

Cult-classic film references aside, the future is looking pretty exciting, if a little scary, in terms of AI and its integration into our day-to-day lives.

Now I’m going to let Google Gemini write my outro…

Outro, as written by Google Gemini

The future of AI is exciting. While current tools might not meet the lofty expectations of science fiction, they’re valuable building blocks. Advancements like GPT-4o show us AI with more complex capabilities are on the horizon. The key is to manage expectations and focus on responsible development. AI can be a powerful tool to solve real-world problems and enhance our lives, but it’s crucial to ensure it’s used ethically and doesn’t become the stuff of dystopian nightmares. By acknowledging both the potential and limitations of AI, we can ensure this technology is used for good.

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Joe: Thanks Gemini! Great work with the ad, too.

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