An Overview of AI
Table of Contents
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1. Introduction
1.1. Who am I?
- R.W. "Moose 🫎" Singh
- Associate Professor of Computer Science at JCCC
- Previously worked in web and software development
- I make indie video games in my free time
- Grew up on the "good internet"
- I've been an Open Source enthusiast for a long time, and have spent a lot of time reading, researching, and thinking about ethics in tech
2. Overview - What is "AI"?
- Traditionally, Artificial Intelligence is a field of Computer Science study that covers many different areas.
- For most people before the 2020s, the term "AI" was something from science fiction, and we have an idea of what we think AI would be like if it were real. (Data from Star Trek, etc.)
- We've had "AI" for many years - the "text-to-speech" and "speech-to-text" features of our phones (or auto-captioning on YouTube) is based on machine learning - one field of Computer Science AI.
- "AI" Chatbots that have popped up since the early 2020s are Large Language Models (LLMs). They are very good at using language, but…
- These LLMs have been trained on the entire internet indescriminately - there are a lot of bad things on the internet.
- These LLMs are developed and owned by big tech companies. Companies like Meta do not have a good track record of caring about their users. Further, these companies compete in the "attention economy". There is a lot of work done in order to keep people stuck to their devices, and LLM-based AI chatbots are no different.
- The hype around AI is similar to other 2010s-2020s grifts: Bitcoin, NFTs, Metaverse