AI, AI, AI what’s all this then?
September 25, 2024
AI: Artificial Intelligence, it may as well have been the sub head of the recent IBC. Was there an exhibitor or a product that didn’t have an AI tale to spin?
We have been here before, the years when AR, VR or 3D were the letter pairs de jour. But AI is different, it isn’t just a media thing or a hype thing, it is the stuff that eras are made of, and we are on the cusp of the AI era.
But, but, give me a break. Not every algorithm that ever went to school is AI, let alone the ‘really cool’ Gen AI that everyone wants you to assume they are talking about. A lot of stuff that’s meat and potatoes Machine Learning (not that ML isn’t already super clever), or, at best Enhanced ML, is now dressed up as AI.
Some of the solutions now spoken of as AI would be jackhammers to crack nuts if they really were. The more sensible vendors are honest about what doesn’t really benefit from AI, and the kind of relatively low-level AI that can be fired at very specific problems – usually focused on pattern recognition that can cut down the heavy lifting in boring bits like compression and security scanning. The key is to break down the AI solutions into useable, efficient (lowest possible processing/power consumption) modules and simply plug them in into the problem area.
And, anyway, if you asked Gen AI to come up with a solution to a new and esoteric technical problem, it wouldn’t have a clue unless someone had already solved the same problem and told the internet about it.
Which brings us to the ethical end of AI. Technologists are, rightly, just as precious about their copyright to solutions and breakthroughs as creatives are about their output. But, somehow, Big Tech didn’t have that in mind when it went about training the LLMs that sit behind Gen AI. The cases now being fought in the US for breach of copyright will provide a signpost as to whether the eight-hundred pound gorilla of Big Tech is not just too big to fail, but also too big to control.
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