AI: a force for good?

AI has been good, bad, and everywhere in between. You hear people say “AI is going to take over the world” or “AI is going to get the nukes codes”. But in reality so far, AI has been used mostly for good. An example of this would be that it is used for medicine. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a technology has been developed for doctors to use AI to detect breast cancer 5 years before a human could do it with their eye. Lifesaving stuff is happening with Artificial Intelligence. But what about at the consumer level?

Apple has released the iphone 16 in September calling it “built for AI”, with ‘Apple Intelligence’. These phones are upwards of 1000 dollars, and for what feature, a beta version of an AI assistant? Chat GPT is well known around the world, and Open AI, the creators of Chat GPT, have launched a voice that you can talk to, powered by GPT-4. You can pick from a style of voice, and in no time, for free, you have an AI assistant, that 1, is not a beta version, and 2. Is programmable to your lock screen with IOS 18.

  I have been trying the chat GPT as my assistant for a couple of weeks now. It knows what I am saying very consistently and can give MUCH more elaborate answers than Siri alone. If you ask it a question like “What is an imaginary number?” it will respond with “An imaginary number is a complex number that can be written as a real number multiplied by the imaginary unit, which is defined by the property that its square is -1. The most common imaginary number is “i,” which satisfies this equation: i² = -1. So, for example, 3i would be an imaginary number. Imaginary numbers are used in mathematics, engineering, and physics to solve problems involving square roots of negative numbers”. If you ask Siri this same question, she will say “I found this on the web”. Pretty lame Apple.

How do I like this AI assistant? It has been excellent. Of course it is a 3rd party app so you can’t ask it to send a message, or make a call. But it still can do a lot of cool things like give you instructions on how to do an oil change. Seriously, I asked for it and I didn’t have to do a full google search rabbit hole. The only cons are that it takes a minute to load, as well as it cannot provide real time things like the weather or world times, and it can’t send or call on my phone, but I can just always use Siri for those simple tasks. 

The  verdict? Chat GPT assistant is awesome for those people who want those itching questions answered in a few seconds, and for busy people like me, who just don’t have time for google. Try it out, it might be the next best thing. I will also show photos on how to download and add to your lock screen on ios. There really is no downside at the moment, but you never know, maybe in a couple of years AI will be the biggest species on earth.