AI Made Simple

Artificial intelligence is expected to trigger the next industrial revolution, completely changing the way many of us work and organise our lives. But when a technology is advancing so rapidly, it can become hard to keep up. In this guide, we make things simple by breaking down the jargon and explaining how AI can help you. We’ll give you an overview of the various AI tools available, and explain their capabilities and limitations. Discover the ways in which AI can help streamline everyday tasks, and learn more about how to use these technologies effectively and responsibly.…

Depending on your age and interests, you probably first encountered the concept of artificial intelligence in a science fiction book or film, most likely in the form of a robot, friendly or otherwise. For the Boomer generation, that could have been Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956) or HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). For Generation X, it might have been the T-800 in The Terminator (1984) or Walter the Wobot in the comic 2000 AD; for Millennials, maybe A.I. (2001) and Robots (2005); and for Gen-Z, possibly Astro-Boy (2009) and Big Hero 6 (2014). For the current generation of kids, born since 2010 or thereabouts and known as Generation Alpha, the experience has been different. Their first encounter with AI might well not have been in…

Conversational chatbots E.g. ChatGPT, Merlin, Meta AI ● It’s undeniably fun to talk with an AI. The conversation can be formal or informal, detailed or vague, useful or simply entertaining – and the speed and nature of its responses is definitely human-like, or rather faster than a human if you ask the tool to generate a long string of text. This technology is increasingly used in customer service, with bots fielding basic queries or passing you on to a human colleague if it can’t provide a solution. Ask it a deep question such as “What is the meaning of life?”, though, and the AI can’t give you a definitive answer: instead, it will offer you a series of existing theories, reminding you that what generative AI actually does is replicate…

Humans are flawed organisms. We do our best to behave well, but at times we all make mistakes – so when we’re entrusted with programming an artificial intelligence that we want to behave in a human-like manner, it’s inevitable that some of our own flaws will emerge in said AI’s behaviour. Examples of errors made by AI applications are rife, even though the technology has only become widespread – at least, in public and in our homes – over the last few years. Some of them are genuinely funny, such as a June 2024 incident when an AI assistant programmed to take McDonald’s customers’ orders at several drive-through restaurants failed to understand their requests. A video on TikTok showing a couple begging the AI to stop adding items to their…

Go to chatgpt.com and at the bottom of the page you’ll see the words ‘By messaging ChatGPT, you agree to our Terms and have read our Privacy Policy’. Pretty standard stuff for a website, right? So let’s have a look. Click on ‘Terms’ and read the 3,443 words that follow. Then go to ‘Privacy Policy’ and read the 2,954 words on that page. All good? Now, just re-read those 6,397 words every single time you use ChatGPT in case they’ve been updated, and of course ask a tame lawyer to read them through as well, and you’re ready to go. What’s that you say? You’re not prepared to do that? Don’t worry – almost no-one is. We’re not singling ChatGPT out here, by the way: pretty much every website, let…

Smarter laundry machines ● We welcome the assistance of AI in this field, having spent far too much money on using too much detergent, overfilling the machine so the job doesn’t get done properly, and then spending ages hanging heavier garments on radiators because they didn’t fully dry. This is a great example of AI saving a busy person a lot of time, with machines capable of optimising wash and dry cycles based on the load (some models can even adjust the cycle based on the types of fabrics detected), automatically adjusting detergent levels, conserving water, and connecting to your phone so you can set and monitor cycles remotely. Voice assistants ● The first physical AI to enter most people’s homes was the Amazon Alexa voice assistant, a cylindrical speaker…