Generative AI - the optimists perspective

Hello and welcome to my first blog, where I will share with you my opinions on generative AI. For those of you recently emergent from your caves generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence that can create new content, such as images, text, music, and more. It is a fascinating and powerful technology that has many applications and benefits for humanity. In this blog, I will explore the latest developments and trends in generative AI, showcase some of the amazing examples and projects that use it, and explain how it works and why it matters.

The history of generative AI can be traced back to the early days of AI research, when pioneers such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann explored the possibility of machines that can generate their own programs or data. In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers such as Claude Shannon and Marvin Minsky experimented with generative models of information theory. In the 1970s and 1980s, generative AI gained more attention with the development of genetic algorithms, neural networks, and evolutionary computation. In the 1990s and 2000s, generative AI advanced further with the introduction of techniques such as hidden Markov models, Bayesian networks, variational auto-encoders, and generative adversarial networks. Recently, generative AI has become one of the most active and exciting areas of AI research, with many challenges and opportunities for innovation and discovery.

Generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new data or content from existing data or content. It has applications in various domains but how does it work?

It is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can create new content based on some input data. For example, a generative AI system can take a sentence or a word and write a paragraph or a story that is related to it. It uses machine learning to learn the patterns and structure of the input data, and then generates new data that has similar characteristics. One of the most famous generative AI applications is ChatGPT that can generate human-like responses to any text prompt. It is chatbot system that uses a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model to generate natural language responses. It was developed by OpenAI, a research organisation dedicated to creating artificial intelligence. ChatGPT was first introduced in 2019 as a large-scale unsupervised language model but since then, ChatGPT has been improved and updated with new features and capabilities enabling it to provide a conversational interface that is engaging, informative, and creative.

Some of the known professional practical applications for generative AI are:

• Text generation: natural language texts for various purposes, such as summarisation, translation, paraphrasing, dialogue, storytelling, etc. This can help with communication, education, entertainment, and information retrieval.
• Image generation: synthesise realistic images from text descriptions, sketches, or other images. This can help with design, art, advertising, and visual effects.
• Audio generation: create realistic sounds or music from text, images, or other audio. This can help with entertainment, education, and audio enhancement.
• Data augmentation: augment existing data sets with new samples that preserve the original distribution and characteristics. This can help with improving the performance and robustness of machine learning models.
• Anomaly detection: detect outliers or abnormal patterns in data sets by comparing them with the expected distribution or characteristics. This can help with security, fraud prevention, and quality control.

In recent years, generative AI has been increasingly used in law firms for various purposes, such as compliance and regulatory monitoring, contract analysis and negotiation, drafting and reviewing, due diligence, intellectual property management and legal research. Allen & Overy is recently reported to have integrated 'Harvey' into its practice. Harvey is a form of generative AI built on a version of Open AI (the creators of Chat GPT) models enhanced for legal work. The firm recently announced that Harvey will be available to over 3,500 lawyers across it's global presence operating in multiple languages with the ability to generate and access legal content, they say with unmatched efficiency, quality and intelligence. Apparently A&O has been trialling Harvey in beta since November 2022 and at the end of the trial, it is said that about 3,500 of A&O’s lawyers had asked Harvey around 40,000 queries regarding their work (Law Society Gazette).

Clearly then, generative AI is not only a powerful technology but also a paradigm shift in how we create and consume content. Lawyers, for example, are often viewed as traditionalists who worship the billable hour and human input and output. Generative AI challenges the traditional notions of authorship, ownership, and authenticity, and consequently raises ethical and social questions about the impact of AI generally on human creativity, work, productivity and society. Nevertheless, as generative AI becomes more accessible and widespread, it is important to understand its potential and to ensure its responsible and beneficial use for the 21st century. In my view, generative AI will at best augment the way we create, interact with one another and do business but it not directed at nor is it capable of replacing the way we do these things. In short, embrace it.

So, there you have it - my first ever blog post. I hope you enjoyed reading it and learned something new. I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the topic I discussed. Please leave a comment below. Your feedback is very valuable to me and thank you for your time and attention.