Even as the technology buzzword from 2022 seems to be “AI” and everyone is talking about it, learning about it or creating content about it(inclusive of me! :)), I was seriously wondering where AI is in real life. I wasn’t seeing it a whole lot. I could see it only on food delivery apps and read about it being used in Google Maps, image and video generation and sparsely in other places as well. But I couldn’t see it anywhere else, and I thought it was another technology fad.
But no, after a while, I could very clearly see it blatantly and clearly all around me in two distinct situations:
Where was I seeing it?
- I was getting an interesting pop-up for training a chatbot to program! (face palm!) From the days of training students in Java, I was now seeing advertisements to train a chatbot to program! (where have we progressed now?!)
How will this work in simple terms:
The AI powered race is on to simplify our life. All companies seem to need this AI chatbot instantly. But how will this chatbot work? As an example, if we ask a question to ChatGPT to write a program to print “Hello World” in Java, it prints it out. But how does this happen?
ChatGPT has been taught to program and list the code out. It has also been taught to explain the code if needed. Who teaches it? The LLMs or the Large language models that feed data to the chatbot scrape data off the Internet and digest it. They, then spit it out to us.
In addition to scraping data off the Internet, now, we will be training the AI model to program, do Math, Physics or Chemistry so, that it can teach the bot to answer your questions! Exciting times isn’t it?
2. Out of the blue, I also received a message that a popular social media platform was using an individuals posts to train their models by default! 🙁 Users had to manually turn off the settings so that their data will not be used to train their models.
From what little I can understand now, it is quite a race to train the AI models and every organization is scraping videos, images, written text off every place available on the Internet.
It is up to us to be alert, go to Privacy settings on all social media platforms and disable them all.
At the end of the day, we all seem to be pawns at the hands of the great AI puppet master knowingly or unknowingly and I hope nobody comes behind the Whatsapp data! 😉
Here’s to a world where things are done transparently and not surreptitiously!