Practical AI

Artificial intelligence is the collective name we give to a spectrum of machine capabilities that range from pattern recognition (more popularly called machine learning) at one end to human decision-making mimics at the other (which we call AI). The difference between the two is no important for this piece but it is key to your knowledge so we shall briefly cover it.

Artificial intelligence systems mimic human-decision making in the way they understand data (like voice search queries for instance) and the answers they give. Machine learning systems analyze and successfully identify specific patterns in data. Artificial intelligence usually relies on some kind of machine learning foundation in order to successfully perform the tasks required of it.

What is really important to us, right now, however, is the fact that both machine learning and artificial intelligence systems have become so powerful and we have become so adept at programming them that they, like search, are beginning to be integrated into our everyday technology.

This is good news for anyone at any level in business looking to save that most valuable commodity: time. And as Tony Stark says “No amount of money ever bought a second of time”.

Which kinda brings me to today’s time-saving theme. Here are some handy AI tools you can use to gain that odd priceless second here and there.

• Text Summarizer. If you need to summarize a document quickly Quillbot’s Summarize which also installs as a Chrome app has a variety of options and outputs. ?A little simpler with way fewer options is Summary Generator which will allow you to paste a document of almost any length and get a quick summary of it.
• Academic research. If you need to bolster that presentation with some real facts and figures in an area you may not be that familiar with an AI research tool will save you countless of hours. Consensus often feels like a merger between ChatGPT (more about which below) and Google’s BARD.
• ChatGPT. “Hallucination” caveats aside ChatGPT used properly is a really powerful tool. Watch how Mushtaq Bilal uses a series of incremental prompts to coax it to give him a brilliant answer.

• Real citations. If you need to get some real citations and want to avoid the potential trap of a Large Language Model (LLM) “hallucination” then scite is your go to tool.
• A picture says a thousand words. Likely you don’t need a thousand words to get a picture that says something specific. Canva’s generator and Nightcafe is also both fun and incredibly easy to use.

That’s it for now. I hope this helps.