What is Artificial Intelligence? Artificial intelligence is amazing nowadays with webapps like Craiyon and OpenAI’s image and text generating AIs that can generate pretty good content based on prompts you feed into it. So what is AI then? I asked the text-davinci-002 AI model to generate something. Here it is:
Write a few paragraphs about what artificial intelligence is.
Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science that deals with the creation of intelligent agents, which are systems that can reason, learn, and act autonomously. The main goals of AI research include developing intelligent systems that can reason like humans, learn from experience, and make decisions in uncertain environments.
Some of the most popular AI applications include expert systems, natural language processing, and robotics. Expert systems are computer programs that mimic the decision-making ability of human experts in a specific domain. Natural language processing is a subfield of AI that deals with the ability of computers to understand human language and respond in a way that is natural for humans. Robotics is another application of AI that deals with the design and control of robots.
Pretty straightforward and to the point, really no frills and I have noticed it lacks voice in general. I’ve played with it quite a bit and you can get some really humorous material sometimes when you enter some sophomoric prompts (yeah, well sometimes I like to mentally be a 13 year old again haha). It has its strengths and weaknesses but I find these as great tools for creating AI assisted fiction or as a way of generating ideas or inspiration. In other words, I’ll be using AI as a creative tool and also to study how it reacts to different prompts.
I’m writing this as I am currently diving into some of the basics of AI and its early origins by watching this Stanford Online lecture. Very interesting stuff that I’d like to get into. The final project with the AI playing Pac Man is something I’d like to do. In fact, another YouTuber by the name of suckerpinch has this video detailing an AI he created that plays NES games. It sounds pretty basic from what he explains. I don’t understand all the details but it sounds like the AI tries to do things that have a “good” outcome over a “bad” outcome. Good being raising the score, lives, etc and bad would be the opposite, losing lives, losing the game. This being the case, it doesn’t work well on all games as he shows in subsequent videos. It needs to be tweaked slightly to be optimized. But then again, these videos are from nine years ago, so I would imagine today’s AIs are very good at games. I have seen a few headlines about AIs that whoop Tetris and Pacman, two challenging classic games.
I also have been trying to get my google AIY voice speaker back in order currently without much luck. I had to reimage the SD card because I hadn’t used the device in months and forgot my login password. Whoopsie. Should’ve written that one down. The plan for that is to get it connected to some natural language AIs and get a chatbot of some sort going. A lot of the stuff might require some sort of payment, but I think I did see that Google offers something like $300 in credit to start with, so it does look like you can play around a little bit before investing any money into it.
That’s all I’ve got to say about AI right now, it has so many applications, more than I can even think about right now. Everything from logistics to medicine, heck can you even think of something that can’t be enhanced through the magic of AI? AI is the future whether we like it or not and now is the time to explore it.
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