WOODVILLE – Woodville Lions heard Tyler County Hospital Chief Information Officer James Stevens, and Lions past president, on the benefits and dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at their regular 2nd-Thursday evening meeting, Sept. 10.
Stevens warned about scammers and about giving personal information on the phone and online, a kind of given today, yet so many are still sucked into scams.
Intriguingly, his overview included several of the services currently available, his choice being Elon Musk's Grok.
Depending upon what you want to do, others include ChatGPT (from Open AI), Gemini (from Google), Copilot (from Microsoft), Claude (from Anthropic), and Perplexity (from Perplexity). How complicated these are is impossible say, for they are always in evolution and there is no end in sight.
Currently, and for the layperson, there are two basic machines, Recognition AI and Generative AI. The first sorts data and the second "generates" text and so forth and can generate a voice that we have all come to know.
These types of AI can help create text, summarize data or lengthy text, and recently a big boon has allowed real-time translation of languages. They can do research, as we have heard, students using AI to write term papers.
Yet Stevens mentioned how the major schools have grown, too, getting ahead of students, making cheating harder, and incorporating AI more assertively into the entire educational process.
AI isn't going away, and the Data Centers are not either. In fact, there is a race afoot to stay ahead of China, and many American-based companies and the U.S. government are feeling the need. It is not a matter of "if" but "who" and "when" one will leap to a strong dominance. There are huge and yet-to-be seen threats, reasonable and unreasonable.
Stevens said they were not built for medical advice, legal conclusions, and live account money management, though there are fears that somehow--like the many movies--AI will find a way to go independent.
There are several "tiers" of AI, from free to subscription, use on cell phones and home computers, and far beyond a Lions Club program and into almost every conceivable industry. In way, as our country runs on oil to fuel cars and make plastics, so too AI has and will continue to help refine industries and foster fears. AI is the next superhighway of technology very much like the internet was in 1990s.
We do not know where AI will go, many experts are planning safeguards, and certainly there will be more surprises down the road in the near future.
