What can generative AI do?
Generative AI assistants like ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot can boost our productivity, help us speed up the tedious tasks we don’t enjoy and make us more effective on the tasks we do enjoy.
We can have a conversation with a Generative AI assistant and it will (hopefully) offer good advice and information. The core of a generative AI assistant is a large language model (LLM).
Generative AI assistants are useful to us today. They can help us do some tasks better and other tasks quicker. AI assistants, such as large language models, have been trained to provide relevant helpful responses to any questions we may pose to them. For example, they can:
- they can answer a question, e.g. Who was Neil Armstrong?, with useful relevant information,
- provide step-by-step instructions for a task, such as making an omelette
- draft a letter with the right tone and style, such as creating a job description
- review and suggest improvements to a document or text,
- brainstorm ideas on a topic, for example, suggest possible titles for a spy novel
- and explain a complex topic like CRISPR gene editing
- and summarise a document or set of web pages, such as this review.
- have a voice conversation with us - keyboards no longer required
- interpret images
- transcribe speech more accurately than most humans
- and perform lots of technical/software tasks: e.g. explain an Excel formula, write SQL or Python code.
Take care when using AI assistants
AI assistants have weaknesses as well as considerable strengths. Here are the three points to bear in mind:
- AI assistants can make mistakes. And when they do lie to us, they do it very convincingly and confidently. Always check any important results independently.
- Unless, your organisation’s AI policy explicitly states otherwise, it is prudent to assume that AI assistants remember and learn from every prompt. Never put any confidential information into AI assistants. Keep your data private.
- AI assistants have learnt from everything on the internet: all the amazing, wonderful content but also some undesirable stuff. They have “guard rails” in place but they are capable of generating harmful content or exhibiting bias so review their output carefully!