Local computer specialist, Brent Chandler, visited with Winnfield Rotarians on January 8 to speak about Artificial Intelligence, at the invitation of Ted Wold, Rotarian of the Day. Chandler and his wife Mindy are owners of dbM Computers located on S. Jones Street across from the courthouse.
Chandler, who studied computer science at Louisiana Tech in the 1990’s, believes the term Artificial Intelligence is an inaccurate term because computers are not intelligent, they are not really able to think as human beings think and perceive and reason. They simply have massive amounts of data through which they can sift and analyze to reach a conclusion. He said at the time of his studies in the field of computers, the information and training on what was termed Artificial Intelligence (AI) was very elementary, but since that time, the field has expanded greatly.
Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computer scientist is considered the “father of Artificial Intelligence.” Turing’s test for determining if a computer has artificial intelligence is when you can’t tell you are communicating with a computer instead of a person.
Chandler said improvements in artificial intelligence have come about with the ever-increasing collection of data, so that if a computer has a large language model (a massive amount of data), it can sift through all the data and use predictive reasoning to produce a conclusion. The huge volume of data stored on the internet along with open-source software has allowed the development of better and better AI. Software companies are doing really well with AI speech and music. Another area in which AI is useful is healthcare. For example, AI can compile comprehensive policy documents which can then be revised by a person to eliminate policies and language not needed and correct incorrect language in a relatively short time. A person would take a long time to create such a document.
The downside of this method of creating software poses problems when software is created and released rapidly before the errors in the computer’s method are detected. This can lead to what is called AI hallucinations, in which the computer makes things up and a person has to go into the program and check the computer’s work for accuracy. It also results in less reliability in copies of the program because the data becomes less and less reliable the more it is copied.
Brent gave some examples of how AI can be used. He brought a picture created by computer with a query requesting a picture of a Rotary meeting with all those attending on unicycles and a picture created by computer with the query requesting a picture of a deer in the woods cutting logs. AI technology is really good at generating pictures of imaginary things or situations. It is also good at generating songs based on a person’s specifications.
This field of computer science is developing rapidly and there is no telling what will become available next because all the big tech companies are competing to develop the next generation of AI.
