Reliance on AI agents currently named as AI GPT -Generative Pretrained Transformer- is full of potentials but risky at the same time. The risk originates from two sources. The first source of risk is relying too much on the GenAI that we allow our innate skills to slip away. The second risk stems from believing too much in the correctness and validity of the GenAI answers.
Excessive reliance on AI, whether generative or rule-based, might degrade one’s inherent intelligence and analytical capabilities. This is not entirely unfounded. I had asked a couple of GenAI’s and they almost have the same answer: “Use AI to augment your abilities, not replace them. I can be a powerful learning tool, but it’s up to you to use me strategically and keep your own critical thinking muscles strong. AI tools like me can be a double-edged sword.” So we need to be cautious about how AI can diminish intellectual ability and how to keep our skills sharp.
Overdependence on AI for tasks that require critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity can potentially lead to a reduction in these cognitive skills over time. Additionally, relying solely on AI for decision-making may result in a lack of personal agency and accountability, as individuals may defer responsibility to the AI without fully understanding or critically evaluating its outputs.
As an example on the required balance on approaching GenAI tools, PMI – Project Management Institute- encourages the use of GenAI assistance on all project aspects. However it defines clearly that GenAI has only the role of consultancy. While the Project Manager (PM) is still accountable for the project decisions. Moreover PMs are responsible for the correct prompt that yields correct answers from GenAI
What are the GenAI potentials?
Generative AI offers immense potential for creativity, innovation, and problem-solving across various domains, from content creation and design to research and education. Its ability to generate contextually relevant and novel outputs makes it a valuable tool for augmenting human capabilities and unlocking new opportunities for exploration and discovery. For coders, it quickly generates different code snippets or functionalities, helping coders brainstorm and prototype ideas more efficiently.
However, to harness the full potential of Generative AI, users must adopt a mindset characterized by clarity of intent, contextual understanding, creativity, ethical responsibility, and continuous learning. By approaching Generative AI with the proper mindset, users can optimize their interactions with AI models, ensure the relevance and effectiveness of generated outputs, and leverage AI technology to achieve their goals and objectives in a responsible and impactful manner.
What can we use GenAI for? vs where does it push itself in our life?
GenAI users try to achieve various tasks and applications, leveraging the capabilities of GenAI models to achieve specific goals and objectives. While on the other hand, Tech firms that develop AI models works hard to introduce them in new areas in life. Here are some key applications of generative AI together with some notes that raises our consciousness while using it:
1. Content Creation:
- Text Generation: Generate written content for various purposes, such as articles, stories, poetry, product descriptions, or social media posts. But, those writings miss your personal essence unless your program a GenAI to your own style by training it across many of your writings. This implies that you already have a plenty of content produced
- Image Generation: Create digital artwork, illustrations, or designs using generative AI models trained on image data. Nevertheless, those images look too much true that they very well deceive a lot of the audience and create fake truth.
- Prototyping and Brainstorming: It can be used to quickly generate different code snippets or functionalities, helping coders brainstorm and prototype ideas more efficiently. This can free up their time and mental energy for the more creative aspects of coding. That’s true unless coders adopt a “Copy and Paste Mentality”. Having readily available code snippets could lead to a tendency to simply copy and paste solutions without understanding the underlying logic.
2. Creative Inspiration:
Google’s Gemini slogan says: “chat to supercharge your ideas”
- New Approaches: Large language models can analyze vast amounts of code and identify patterns or connections that humans might miss. This could inspire writers, authors, maintenance teams and coders to explore new approaches and solutions to problems. However never undermine your own creative abilities, you created neural networks, Generative Pretrained Transformers and many other tools that helped us reach GenAI assistance between our hands.
- Generation: Use it mainly to generate ideas and concepts for brainstorming sessions, creative projects, or problem-solving exercises. It can assist by generating prompts, plot ideas, character names, or dialogue snippets.
3. Personalization and Customization:
- Product Recommendations: Provide personalized product recommendations based on user preferences, purchase history, or browsing behavior. However, some of them is too much annoying that they keep recommending what you had already purchased.
- Content Personalization: Tailor content recommendations, such as articles, videos, or music playlists, to individual user preferences. On other hand this limits your perspective to what you had decided to follow at some point in your life. So we need consciously to break the pattern
4. Design and Innovation:
- Design Exploration: Explore design possibilities for architecture, fashion, interior design, or product design through generative AI-generated concepts and prototypes. At some point those designs might generate the trends for us.
- Innovative Solutions: Generate novel solutions to complex problems in engineering, science, healthcare, or business by leveraging generative AI’s creative capabilities. Keep in mind that it is us who do this leveraging to reach new horizons quickly. So, there is no meaning to worship the GenAI models which can solve any complex problem. Or, believe that it is more innovative than human beings. The fact is that sometimes we prefer to stay lazy and keep our engines running on low power and rely on the GenAI potentials.
5. Language Translation and Summarization:
That’s where GenAI or its first model came to life specially through Google translate in 2006.
- Language Translation: Translate text between languages using generative AI models trained on multilingual corpora. And even predicting what you were trying to enter in the translation prompt. Then recommending a better variation based on the GenAI experience that may match what you are trying to ask for, Which might be not matching what you are trying to achieve. GenAI expects that you are similar to the 90% of the users and documents used in its training. In reality, you might be from the 10% who are looking for something different than the crowd. Moreover, you might be from the creative 1% who are trying new things that the model never encountered or generated before.
- Text Summarization: Summarize lengthy documents, articles, or research papers into concise and digestible summaries for quick review. That’s a great option when you want a quick overview about a topic. But, if you rely on these summaries as your own source of information, you will be shallow in your knowledge. You might pass an exam that’s around the corner but you won’t be able to use this information later in your life. That looks like a valid reason for many students who say that the academic studies has nothing to do with the practical life. But the fact might be that they are using same shallow mentality they used to pass the exams in their work. Or, that’s the level of work assigned to them. At higher levels, you can sense a link to the academic work that you were looking low on it in your study years.
6. Conversational Agents and Chatbots:
- Virtual Assistants: Develop conversational agents and chatbots that can engage users in natural language dialogue and provide assistance or information on various topics. That’s great when you don’t want to feel alone while doing your day-to-day duties.
- Customer Support: Enhance customer support services by deploying chatbots to handle routine inquiries, troubleshoot issues, or provide product recommendations. So far those chatbots can help you with an entry level problem or a common problem with the product. Real bigger problems usually -so far- needs a qualified human customer support.
Let’s continue with more areas where we can use the potentials of GenAI innovatively as Arts and music, gaming, education and experimentation. As usual with insights about how AI might get pushed in our way through this areas and what we need to care about to mitigate its risks to our innate skills and talents. Stay safe and intelligent 🙂
