AI Literacy Guide

What is AI?

Source: Crash Course

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Literacy

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence is both a field of study and a type of technology. Artificial Intelligence or AI refers to the capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate human behavior (OED). (Read More)

AI technologies are data-driven, and largely rely on three major subfields:

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

One of the important things to note is that we do not currently have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI, also known as Strong AI or Human-Level Machine Intelligence (HLML) refers to systems capable of conducting a complete range of intellectual tasks at a level equaling that of the best-performing human beings. This type of Artificial Intelligence is still entirely theoretical, but continues to be researched. (Read More)

Generative AI

Generative AI uses techniques that learn from representations of data and model artifacts to generate new artifacts. Generative AI applications are all created on top of Foundational Models: ML models trained on a broad spectrum of generalized and unlabeled data and capable of performing a wide variety of general tasks.

Generative AI can learn from existing artifacts to generate new content that reflect the characteristics of their training data. (Read More)

Large Language Models (LLMs)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are deep learning algorithms that are trained on massive amounts of data using significant computing power.
 
LLMs are part of a class of deep learning models called Transformer Models, which learns from tracking patterns in sequential data.
 
LLMs are trained on a broad set of unlabeled data, which doesn't have any meaningful tags or labels and usually consists of natural or human-created samples (i.e. photos, audio recordings, videos, news articles, tweets, or x-rays that can be easily obtained).

Generative AI-Powered Chatbots

The most common form that Generative AI takes is as a Chatbot. A chatbot is a computer program that simulates conversation with a human end user, using Natural Language Processing. Screenshot of a chat with Copilot. Prompt: Summarize the week's news.

The most popular, generalized Generative AI chatbots are:

Non-AI Chatbots

It is important to recognize that not all chatbots online will use Generative AI to formulate responses. Non-AI chatbots follow prescriptive workflows and cannot generate new responses.

They use keyword-search to draw from a knowledge base of frequently asked questions (FAQs), manually created by a human.
 
Sometimes users can write unique prompts, and sometimes they will need to choose from a bank of options/workflows.

 

Generative AI tools are new, and many of the free versions use open models, in which developers from outside the organization can examine, modify, and distribute training data and code.  

Open Models

And open model will — while operational — continue to learn from user inputs and prompts.
This puts certain information at risk. For example:
  • Private or privileged information (e.g. trade secrets, identifying information, etc.)
  • Copyrighted or licensed information (e.g. articles or reports downloaded from databases, books, etc.)

Closed Models

A closed model that no longer accepts inputs or changes to itself. For example, Babson's subscription to Copilot is closed. The general, free, public interface is open.