Just when you thought it was safe to live in a world that has been taken over by AI, along comes Generative AI. So, what is Generative AI and how is it different (and scarier) than traditional AI?
Artificial intelligence
AI is a technology that can perform tasks that traditionally only humans could perform. AI helps create smart and intelligent machines that are capable of performing tasks without human intervention.
There are many useful applications of AI that have changed our lives for the better like online banking, GPS, online shopping, music and media streaming, robotics, automated marketing, e-commerce recommendation systems, and more.
Generative AI
(G.A.) is essentially a more intelligent form of AI. It can generate new content, rather than simply analyzing or acting on existing data. It can produce various types of content, including text, imagery, audio, and synthetic data. The recent buzz about Generative AI has been driven by the simplicity of new user interfaces for creating high-quality text, graphics, and videos in a matter of seconds. It’s kind of like AI on steroids.
According to Techopedia, G.A. is any type of artificial intelligence that can be used to create new text, images, video, audio, code, or synthetic data.
Arguably, because machine learning and deep learning are inherently focused on generative processes, they can be considered types of Generative AI, too.
The term “Generative AI” is often associated with ChatGPT, the new platform that was initially used to automate the repetitive processes used in digital image correction and digital audio correction.
In fact, Generative AI was introduced in the 1960s with chatbots. But it wasn’t until 2014, with the introduction of generative adversarial networks, or GANs — a type of machine learning algorithm — that generative AI could create convincingly authentic images, videos, and audio of real people.
ChatGPT
The introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 brought G.A. into the spotlight. (GPT stands for “Generative Pre-training Transformer”) ChatGPT has the potential to take over many new roles traditionally held by humans. Jobs like copywriting, coding, answering customer questions, writing news reports, and creating legal documents.
It can be supervised by humans or unsupervised. Unsupervised learning, also known as unsupervised machine learning, uses machine learning algorithms to analyze and cluster unlabeled datasets. These algorithms discover hidden patterns or data groupings without the need for human intervention.
ChatGPT can also conduct a conversation and comprehend our instructions to provide an answer with emoticons and in language, a 10-year-old can understand. It is both groundbreaking and a little scary.
The Generative AI Era is here, and while it is exciting for all kinds of businesses and industries. If you’re a writer or supplier of any kind of data content, should you be worried?
Josef Steen, content executive at the global digital agency Clarity, is not worried. He says ChatGPT can make a writer’s job easier and can produce rich, engaging, and original content. He maintains that If we approach ChatGPT as a starting tool for gathering necessary content to build a feature article, opinion piece, or blog post. We can use it as a way to scaffold more detailed and precise knowledge that a writer can then synthesize. That way, we get the most well-informed background information for whatever we write.
The challenge is how to adapt to Generative AI and leverage it, so it works for you – not against you. And as artificial intelligence gets more intelligent, you might be asking more questions – am I going to lose my job? Will my job be replaced by AI? Can people and machines work as collaborators, not competitors? Only time will tell.
