Is AI Going To Takeover The World?

Here we are in the year 2023, the company OpenAI introduced us to their new product, ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence engine. What does this mean? Well, putting it simply, it generates text, images, and other media. With the usage of OpenAI’s API (application programming interface) for ChatGPT, many companies and individuals have created some wonderful inventions, powered by the popular generative AI engine.

Personally, I created the InspectGPT component for my Cognicio facility management system. InspectGPT will generate any online inspection form given a simple prompt. If I wanted to prepare an inspection form for restaurants, I would simply type “restaurant kitchen” in the prompt and voila! The form generated can be used to guide a Cognicio user through the inspection process, and then appropriately score the success of the inspection. What a time saver!

A colleague of mine created R.O.B., which generates basic but complete content for a single paged website, given a few short questions. This process can streamline micro-site web development to one or two days versus one or two weeks.

As I started to write more articles, I have found that the using ChatGPT can be valuable to the writing process: not to replace the hard work of crafting a well written and thought-out article that is appropriately researched, but to provide a nice framework and base for the article.

Using AI technology to write an article can be compared to using code generation tools to write a program. Application developers have used code generation tools for years, if not decades. Code generation tools have proven to help eliminate the mundane programming tasks in an application, therefore, shortening the development phase of the project lifecycle.

Do writers and developers need to fear the loss of their jobs due to the introduction of generator tools? No, of course not.

To get the best output of generator tools, human input in definitely required.

First, the old rule “Garbage In Garbage Out” still applies. The better sources that you use to feed the AI engine, the better the generated text will be. The better the configuration of the code generator, the better the resulting code will be.

Second, even though, the resulting text may technically sound great, just as the generated code will technically run, the resulting text will not have the character of the author or developer. It is lacking je ne sais quoi.

The author still needs to take the generated text and build on it and, therefore, “making it their own”. In the programming world, the generated application may work great, but when used in the real world by real users, there will always be exceptions and customization that the developer needs to take into account, and, thusly, “making it their own”.

In both programming and journalism/writing, the usage of AI tools and generators can drastically shorten the time it takes to release or publish the end work product, but it is still not a substitution for the contribution of original intellectual property.

Wrapping Up

We must also remember that AI programming is not new. It has been around for over 20 to 30 years. I remember taking a class on this topic when I attended the University of Florida back in 1995, where I was an Information Systems major in the College of Business. We, as a collective, have just been able to improve the processing of AI engines given the now globally inter-connectivity of computers and networks now. The more diverse and vast the source data is, the more rich and productive the end products of modern generation tools will be.

In the immortal words of Johnny 5 in the 80’s movie Short Circuit,

“More Input!”