Tech Talk: Will Artificial Intelligence take your job?
 | Author:
Victor Sample
Vic Sample: MT43 News Treasurer |
Will Artificial Intelligence take your job?
Victor Sample
This is the year of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Every weekday I receive a tech newsletter that lists the top articles of the day. Every day there is another article or 2 about Artificial Intelligence and what effect it will have on our daily lives.
Earlier this year IBM and other tech companies announced the layoffs or planned layoffs of employees losing their jobs to AI. Many customer support websites offer a chat option with a support rep – but increasingly those reps are actually AI Chat engines.
I have seen a lot of articles predicting that in the future AI will do most (if not all) computer programming.
A leading AI engine is ChatGPT. Microsoft is adopting ChatGPT in a big way. If you use the Microsoft Bing search engine you can directly interface with ChatGPT. Google has introduced its AI engine called Bard. If you google “Bard” you can interact with their AI bot.
I was first exposed to ChatGPT in January at a Southwest Montana meeting. Rachael Elliott-Brug and I were representing Broadwater County at the special meeting to rewrite the Southwest Montana mission statement and vision. After working all morning on rewriting the mission and vision, Katya Petersen of Tempest Technologies brought up ChatGPT and asked it to write a mission statement for us.
It was pretty amazing what the AI engine came up with. We did not use the mission statement that was generated by AI but we certainly did borrow from it.
After Microsoft made ChatGPT easily usable from its Bing search I started experimenting with it. I do periodically ask ChatGPT for examples of programming and quite often it comes up with something useful. However, many times the answers it gave me were just plain wrong. When I corrected ChatGPT it graciously acknowledged that I was correct and that it was wrong; quite often it gave me the correct answer on the second try.
For the last few weeks, I have gotten more serious about determining the strengths and the weaknesses of both ChatGPT and Bard. Rather than asking about tech things – which generally are pretty easy to research and answer – I started asking about newspapers in Townsend and Broadwater County.
The results were pretty interesting and sometimes quite humorous.
One of the more useful things about both AI engines is that you do establish a chat with them. Searching with Bing or Google is very transactional; With ChatGPT and Bard, it is very interactive – like speaking with a person.
The results were pretty mixed. When asked about a newspaper in Townsend, both the Townsend Start and the Broadwater Reporter were listed as Townsend newspapers. When I gave the AI engines feedback that both papers no longer publish, both AI verified that I was correct and apologized for the confusion and they both asked for patience since they are still learning.
However, morning after morning they give the same information and graciously accept the same feedback – but their answers never seem to change. On one hand that is a good thing, if they accepted everyone’s feedback it would be easy to tell them lies. However, both AI engines “verified” my feedback – but did not seem to incorporate the corrections.
ChatGPT has some interesting quirks. Once, when I pointed out that the Broadwater Reporter is no longer published it told me it was listed on the TownsendMT website business directory – and so there! When I challenged the answer by asking it to show me any newspaper published after March 2022, ChatGPT said “I don’t care to continue this conversation; is there anything else you would like to discuss?”. As a matter of fact, quite often if challenged it will shut down the conversation.
The Google Bard AI engine was also fascinating. When I first asked about a newspaper in Townsend it gave me a lot of information about the Broadwater Reporter – including that it was founded in 1897 and has been publishing continuously ever since. When I pointed out that the Townsend Star was founded in 1897 but stopped publishing in 2013, Bard then confirmed that was true and stated that it was owned by Lee Enterprises and was shut down for unknown reasons. I corrected the information about the Townsend Star and the Broadwater Reporter which it, as usual, graciously accepted.
When asked about a newspaper in Townsend, Bard will still list the Broadwater Reporter and the Townsend Star and it is still confused about which one was founded in 1897; but, it no longer mentions either one as being owned by Lee Enterprises.
While both ChatGPT and Bard are fascinating to experiment with, at this time any company planning to replace humans with AI will be making a major mistake. Both AI engines are pretty good at doing very simple, straightforward tasks. They are not ready for anything beyond that.
Perhaps in the future AI engines will improve dramatically and be able to really replace human beings for some tasks, but for now, I am doubtful.
