Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:31 PM for 15h 02m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 8.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1789, revolutionary insurgents Storm the Bastille in Paris.
There’s so much confusion about artificial intelligence, that even a layperson’s article from May in the Washington Post is suitably corrective. Pranshu Verma and Rachel Lerman offer A curious person’s guide to artificial intelligence (‘Everything you wanted to know about the AI boom but were too afraid to ask’):
Artificial intelligence is an umbrella term for a vast array of technology. There is no single definition, and even researchers disagree. Generally, AI is a field of computer science that focuses on creating and training machines to perform intelligent tasks, “something that, if a person was doing it, we would call it intelligence,” said Larry Birnbaum, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University.
For decades, AI has largely been used for analysis, allowing people to spot patterns and make predictions by assessing huge sets of data.
But advancements in the field have led to a boom in generative AI, a form of artificial intelligence that can make things. The technology can create words, sounds, images and video, sometimes at a level of sophistication that mimics human creativity. It backs chatbots like ChatGPT and image generators like DALL-E.
Although this technology can’t “think” like humans do, it can sometimes create work of a similar quality. AI-powered image generators have made photos that tricked art judges into thinking they were human-made, and voice generating software has preserved voices of people suffering from degenerative diseases such as ALS.
There are opportunities here, both big and small.
For example, ChatGPT wrote a haiku for me about the delay in reaching a settlement over the Whitewater Aquatic Center:
Pooling dreams deferred,
School district’s funding stalemate,
Town’s splash waits, longing.
Imperfect, yet serviceable. This whole artificial intelligence thing may work out after all.
How to Give Ukraine’s Army of Bakers and Plumbers a Fighting Chance: