Artificial Intelligence is the most transformative aspect of technology, changing the very facet of society. The potential avenues of its application are vast. Artificial Intelligence has enabled tasks to be performed intelligently, from forecasting sales or weather to recommending books and music. Your computer is trained to give you all the valuable insights that will help you make quick decisions. Generative AI is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence that focuses on the generation of content rather than analysing it or simply predicting something from the data. It is transformative in a big way, for Gen AI has made it simple to generate text, videos, images, audio, and whatnot! Just a few days back, the world noticed the generation of enticing Ghibli art style pictures- platforms such as ChatGPT witnessed a surge of image uploads so as to generate these creative images of yours. That's the power of Gen AI!
Tools such as DALL-E, Stable diffusion allow you to enter a text prompt, followed by the generation of playful and creative images or videos, unleashing the creative potential of Generative AI. The shift towards generative AI in today's era has been made possible by the use of Large Language Models, especially Transformers. GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a deep learning model and belongs to a family of diverse large language models. Open AI, an AI-based firm, developed the GPT model first version in 2018, with subsequent advanced models like GPT-4 and GPT-4o making their way in 2023 and 2024.
Transformer models such as GPT, BERT have revolutionized this era by making tasks easier for humans, with their capabilities of text summarization, code generation, and image generation. These models have been trained with huge amounts of data and are fine-tuned to solve any of your tasks. In the media industry, Gen AI is your assistant to write scripts, generate voiceovers, create music scores, and visual effects. It can summarize lengthy reports, suggest headlines, and also figure out if any misinformation is getting circulated. In business, it helps write emails, posts, and even legal documents. This technological revolution is helping professionals save time, explore new ideas, and enhance productivity.
Gen AI-based tools can also be linked to voice assistants through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so as to answer your complicated queries. Gen-AI assistants such as ChatGPT are humanized, and they are trained to answer your queries in the most possible accurate form. A word of caution- do not rely on them fully, because these models are prone to making mistakes, and they are incomplete without human intervention.
That brings me to my next question- will the use of Gen AI tools relinquish jobs in the market? A survey based on the views of engineering students suggests that jobs such as proofreading, editing might witness a blow. However, for complicated tasks where analysis or coding is involved, you do need human supervision and expertise to validate what these models are doing. I believe that no task is complete without the involvement of human creativity and expertise. Generative AI tools are here to make a difference, but only as companions, not as competitors. There might be a time when novelists would pen down a complete book using Gen AI, or business owners would design a complete campaign using these tools. This is an emerging reality, but what we need to realize is - the future of Gen AI lies in our hands. The power to use this technology wisely depends on us, and by staying ethical and human, we can unleash its power to an unimaginable extent.
About the Columnist
Dr. Shefali Arora is a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering, and she is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Dr. BR Ambedkar National Institute of Technology Jalandhar. She is a lecturer by profession but an author by passion. She has several books to her credit: 'A Paradise of Thoughts' (a short poetry book of haiku and senryu), 'The Infinite Road' (fiction), 'Dare.Dream.Travel' (non-fiction), and ‘Bittersweet Coffee’( fiction).
