Artificial Intelligence Size-Up

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What do you have? That’s a common question that gets asked by a new incident commander as he approaches a scene. The IC is asking for information about for an update or a more precise size up.

With Artificial Intelligence moving very quickly into our daily lives and those of our children, now is the time to ask a similar question. What do we have? A tool? A replacement? The end of humanity?

It’s important to understand the nuts and bolts of any problem. Knowing what is inside is important to develop tactics and strategies to confront the problem.

While the use of AI seems new it has actually been around for quite sometime. The term Artificial Intelligence was coined in the 1950’s as a way of describing programs that were designed to operate in a similar way to the human brain.

Sid Dorbin defines Artificial Intelligence as both theory and and development of computer systems that can perform tasks that previously required human intelligence(pg. 4).

From this definition Dorbin provides two functions of AI that make up the whole concept: Conceptual AI and Applied AI. Conceptual AI is how we think AI should work and affect us. Applied AI is how it really gets used.

For parents I think that we are overwhelmed with the Conceptual AI where it seems to be able to do everything that we do. What we need to do have a structured Application of how this tool can be used.

A great place to start is with some basic terminology. I have taken these from the Glossary of Dorbin’s book Talking about Generative AI: A Guide for Educators. This should help begin the process of understanding what we have when we talk about AI.

Applied AI- How to use AI, generally and specifically.

Artificial Intelligence- The theory and development of computer systems that can perform tasks that previously required human intelligence.

Conceptual AI- How we think about the ramifications of developing AI.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)- A set of algorithms that can generate seemingly new, realistic content, including text, images, or audio, based on training data and Large Language Models.  Gen AI can be thought of as any AI that can produce what appears to be original content.

Large Language Models (LLMs)- Machine learning algorithms that use deep learning to identify, scrub, and process natural language.  LLMs “train” uses large quantities of text data to learn patterns and entity relationships in the language.

ChatGPT- text generating AI chatbot created by open AI; does not interact with the web (Yee).

OpenAI- The company that created ChatGPT.