I think most people understand how AI is a big buzz word similar to big data was a couple years ago so much that I remember it actually being one of the titles for one of my courses for my MIS major. What I don’t think people understand is the extent that AI plays in our day to day life.
Plenty of people look at the pixel or iphone X’s photo quality and think “wow, that photo turned out even better than I could take on a professional DSLR camera. This camera quality is amazing.” What they don’t understand is how much AI played a role into perfecting that photo pixel by pixel (excuse my pun).
AI in its broadest definition is the ability for machines to learn and think like humans. It’s intelligence that is not stagnant but continually evolving. And, we’ve just begun diving deep into AI’s range of capabilities.I recently came across a video on Facebook where someone compared photos taken in real life vs. photos created by AI, and the results are truly indistinguishable. In another video, I saw how people could find pictures of celebrities on the internet and give them a smile with the click of a button.
The one interesting thing is AI never used to be this versatile or believable. Here are some pictures shown below from an article that compared AI from just a couple years ago to the following year afterwards.
This was the result of AI in 2015:
And, this was the result of AI in 2016:
Clearly, it is evident that AI is no longer a baby that we can sit back and watch but it is a growing discipline as it continues to develop in an evolving technology landscape. In fact, this post in itself is already a blog post that can be considered “too late.”
But, the point of this post isn’t to make you aware of what AI can do as if it’s new technology, but it’s to make you aware of how AI has sneaked into our lives and think about the impact of what AI is and has already impacted us today.
With all of this change, it’s easy to just think how cool this new technology is and become saturated with the WOW factor. While it’s definitely funny how we can create memes and funny videos using the exact facial expressions of President Trump, it’s even more important to understand the implications that come with the power of AI and why we should not become carried away with the new technology that makes life more easy, more fun, more this or more that. Because, just like any tool, AI can be used for either good or bad.
