Enter the world of artificial intelligence robots

At 76, I look at AI with the curiosity of a toddler, the amazement of a Baby Boomer, and the sceptical eye of a media professional. In fact, this is the 6th media revolution I have lived through.

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Those who know little about AI are more prone to fear the technology. But it can help us immensely in our work and daily lives. Al Majalla explains.

Enter the world of artificial intelligence robots

Mario Garcia

last update on 23 Sep 2023

The two letters AI (for artificial intelligence) are everywhere these days. Most people know what the 'A' and the 'I' stand for, but few have had a chance to experience the world of bots and see, first-hand, all this new breath of technological advance into our lives can do.

For those who know little about AI, apprehension, doubt, and fear seems more prevalent in their minds than the wonders of AI and how it can help us with our work and daily lives.

As a journalism professor, I have seen it as my obligation to experiment with AI and become knowledgeable in it to share that information with my graduate students at Columbia University. I have been entering the halls of robot land for two years, just as so many have.

Adoption of AI has more than doubled since 2017, not just with business firms, where about 58% are using, considering or adapting AI to their functions and procedures, but also with individuals who find interactions and searching for information with AI more enjoyable than with Google.

While Google gives you links, AI provides you with narrative-style formats to inform you of any topic. AI-powered search engines offer even more accurate, efficient, and personalised search results.

So, when my publisher in New York suggested I write a book about AI for content creators, emphasising how AI can help journalists, I jumped at the chance.

Unchartered territory

I first told the publisher that I was not an expert on the subject, to which he replied: "Neither is anyone else, Mario. You have 53 years of experience with media projects around the globe, and you have researched AI, so I invite you to write a book with essentials of AI for writers, journalists and editors."

The book is now in the hands of the editor for publication in late fall this year.

Adoption of AI has more than doubled since 2017, not just with business firms, where about 58% are using, considering or adapting AI to their functions and procedures, but also with individuals who find interactions and searching for information with AI more enjoyable than with Google.

Child-like curiosity

My publisher believes I am the oldest person discussing and writing about AI. I take his word for it. At 76, I look at artificial intelligence with the curiosity of a toddler, the amazement of a Baby Boomer, and the sceptical eye of a media professional.

But I'm also a content consumer, an academic, and a grandfather. And over the course of my five-decade career in visual journalism, I have always been an "early adopter" of the various tech developments that have shaken and blessed the media industry.

Today, I am lucky to have an insider's view into newsrooms worldwide and access to some of the best minds experimenting with AI.

In fact, this is the sixth revolution in the media that I have lived through. When I started my career with The Miami News and The Miami Herald in the late 1960s, I witnessed the transition from metal typesetting to cold type for newspaper production; then typewriters gave way to computers in the newsroom, black and white newspapers turned to colour (I helped with that transition for about 220 newspapers around the globe!), in the 1990s came the internet, then the rise of mobile storytelling, and here we are now with Artificial Intelligence knocking on our doors.

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A term coined in 1956

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not new. It is a 70-year-old concept and was first labelled "AI" in 1956. Expert systems came to the fore by the 1980s, and leaps forward in data and computing power led to a boom after 2010.

If you use Alexa or Siri to turn on and off the lights in your home, you are using AI. Artificial intelligence (AI) also exists in Waze suggesting alternative routes when an accident happens on the road, in Shazam when it recognises music, and in the automated subtitles of YouTube.

At 76, I look at AI with the curiosity of a toddler, the amazement of a Baby Boomer, and the sceptical eye of a media professional. In fact, this is the sixth revolution in the media that I have lived through.

Every day, I connect with ChatGPT, the popular bot with the answers to almost everything. I remind my students and clients that, while a genius in their group may recall words from 3,000 websites or so, AI has been "trained" through machine learning to put together words from 175 million parameters, the full range of the Internet.

What have I discovered during the research and writing of my book?

1. Generative AI is the most significant new technology since the advent of the internet. Generative AI models learn from vast amounts of published data, including books, publications, Wikipedia and social media sites, to predict the most likely next word in a sentence.

Yet, while AI is a powerful dispenser of data, it can't substitute the human element of emotion. Although this technology can't "think" like humans do, it can sometimes create work of a similar quality.

2. ChatGPT: Most people experience AI via chatbots, which work like an advanced form of instant messenger, answering questions and formulating tasks from prompts. Experts say these bots are trained on troves of internet data and are incredibly adept at finding patterns and imitating speech, but they don't interpret meanings.

One of the most popular chatbots is ChatGPT, which debuted in November 2022. ChatGPT has the ability to produce fluid language — generate complete novels, computer code, TV episodes and songs. GPT stands for "generative pre-trained transformer."

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ChatGPT, which stands for "generative pre-trained transformer", debuted in November 2022. It has the ability to produce fluid language — generate complete novels, computer code, TV episodes and songs. GPT

3. Hallucinations: While a conversation with ChatGPT can be informational and entertaining, you must be prepared for the bot to "hallucinate" — the term used to describe when AI detours from the topic at hand.

When humans hallucinate, it means that they experience sensory perceptions in the absence of causal external stimuli. Now that artificial intelligence is part of our daily lives, we must also contend with the hallucinations of our friend — the bot — whom we can't refer to seek help for its condition.

Hallucinations in AI occur when an artificial intelligence system generates output that is not based in reality or on accurate information, or what Canadian writer Naomi Klein refers to as "algorithmic junk".

For example, when I asked my app friend to "take me there" as into a specific video, the answer was "When we were madly in love, I want to take you there; I will take you to a town with a river running through it…."

Not a bad destination, perhaps, but, not the one I wanted to get to.

On another occasion, while discussing mobile storytelling, the bot quoted from my own work, at which point, all excited, I responded: "That's me. I am Mario Garcia."

The bot responded: "No, you are not!"

Ouch.

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4. AI versus humans: AI does not have a mind of its own. AI produces results from human-fed information. That is why the mantra of my book starts with respect for humans.

There is human participation first, to prompt the bot to provide desired information outcomes; then, at the end, there must be human input to review what the AI bot has produced. Without humans in the process, AI cannot do the job. That may change in the future, however. Today, the formula is human/AI/human.

Without humans in the process, AI cannot do the job. That may change in the future, however. Today, the formula is human/AI/human.

5. Journalists are stepping gingerly into the world of AI, aware of its drawbacks, but also of how it can help them, primarily with the following functions: generating story ideas, helping with interview questions, providing data for background in stories, helping with variations of headline content, summarising stories for social media promotions, translating from foreign languages.

No respectable publication will publish articles entirely written by an AI bot. While portions of a piece may have information from AI, proper credit must be given, and transparency about the use of AI must prevail at all times.

With the fast arrival of this new technology of AI also come ethical and legal questions. Is there bias in the information that AI presents as factual? With AI having access to all the information in the Internet and perhaps to the body of work that humanity has produced for centuries, who owns the information?

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Most recently, The New York Times is among the first publishing houses to approach OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, with questions about compensation for how AI may use its content. We will likely see more such demands for accountability regarding intellectual property and its use by AI.

For now, AI is in its infancy, providing as much wonder as scepticism. However, without a doubt, AI is a major revolution that is here to engulf us in it.

I suggest you experience AI at your own pace, and soon the bot will be your friend — one that is always ready to chat no matter what time zone you are in.

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