***** Where AI excels *****

Obviously, to anyone familiar with my missives on these topics, I am extraordinarily critical of generative AI systems. I won't bend your ear (or eyes) with the details in this message. My stance on this is clear enough.

BUT, I do want to emphasize that my concerns are almost entirely with generative AI, not with AI in general.

First: I don't worry about "evil AI systems" taking over the world or exterminating humanity. Great sci-fi plots though. The most evil AI in film I know of is the computer from "The Invisible Boy" (1957). I mean, that is one really, really nasty AI, who turns Robby the Robot into his slave. Jeez. But these are fantasies.

One sector where AI really excels is in analysis of patterns. Medical diagnostics. Speech recognition. A long list where these machine learning systems are just vastly better than humans at dealing with masses of data and extracting key insights from them. Sidenote: I really enjoy watching the #Google speech recognition system at work, as it quickly corrects, capitalizes, and in other ways "homes in" on utterances as your continuing speech provides more context. I'm pretty constantly amazed at how it picks up on what I would consider to be subtle cues.

In any case, the distinction between this kind of AI and generative AI is not made frequently enough or clearly enough by the mass media at least, with so much attention on generative AI these days.

And it's a very important distinction to keep in mind.

L