Mastodawn

Serious ask:

I need a crash-course in AI.

Context: my line manager has been asked to evaluate the use of AI at work. He's come to me to ask if I want to help, as he knows I hate it (and he does too), but I'm...vaguely aware...that not all things that are called "AI" are equal.

(like, the "AI" of NPCs in a game is not the same as the "AI" used to create the type of image we generally call "slop", right?)

We want to make sure we're armed with decent knowledge, because we don't want people to say "Oh, ignore them, they're just haters" if we're talking about something that maybe isn't the "bad" kind of AI (if such a thing exists - I don't know enough to be confident right now)

At the moment, *to the best of my currently limited knowledge*, our AI usage is pretty much limited to people using Gemini to create emails and transcripts of meetings.

(I hope that makes sense)

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D Ingram 4d ago

@neonsnake The world of AI is much broader than Generative AI. If there's a use for directed neural nets, machine learning, computer vision etc then be open to it. One way of shutting down being a forced sloperator is to use other AI where appropriate to "tick the box"

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NeonSnake 4d ago

@ingram Thank you

Would you be able to explain "neural nets, machine learning, computer vision" in VERY layman's terms to me?

And would it be possible for me - not very techy - to recognise them vs LLMs?

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Bruno Nicoletti 4d ago

@neonsnake @ingram Wiki has a good overview. Machine learning is the automated statistical analysis of existing data that allows you to perform tasks on new data without explicit programming. eg: by looking at x-rays of people with and without cancer being able to look at new x-rays and determine if the person has cancer or not. ML has been done for decades and there are many techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

Machine learning - Wikipedia

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Bruno Nicoletti 4d ago

@neonsnake @ingram Neural networks are a type of ML which roughly simulates how the nerves in a brain works, using clever tricks to establish the correct "connections" between nerves. Machine vision is a broad range of techniques used to analyse images and extract meaning from them, typically via neural networks. LLMs are _very_ large neural networks that allow you generate text that is a likely response based on an input prompt. "Spicy autocomplete".

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Bruno Nicoletti

@neonsnake @ingram So LLMs and chatbots are a subset of ML. The question is what are you trying to achieve and how might machine learning help you.