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This welcome video was created using generative AI tools in the summer of 2023. It was made with the intent to show both the capabilities and limitations of these emerging technologies.
It was created using the following tools:
What do you notice about the video?
While the resulting media might seem a little surreal or silly, the aspect we wanted to highlight was the speed with which it was generated. All of the media materials were created within a matter of minutes, much longer than it took to write the initial script.
GenAI tools, like ChatGPT, can be incredibly powerful in the research process for tasks like brainstorming, writing abstracts, or even getting feedback on your writing.
However, the technology is designed to make things up based on data that it has been trained on and should not be trusted to generate accurate, truthful information. This is why critical evaluation of the content is required. If you are looking for well vetted information or resources, the library search and our databases are a better bet.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be tricky to define because of its position in the popular imagination, where it is often understood in science fiction as a type of machine that thinks like a human.
This explains why Merriam-Webster provides two definitions for AI:
a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers (the technical one)
the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior (the popular imagination one)
Within computer science there are different ways of understanding the term “AI”:
General vs. Generative AI:
With regards to the popular idea of “AI,” computer scientists define this as “Artificial general intelligence (AGI),” which is a form of AI that does not yet exist and “would be when an AI system can learn, understand, and solve any problem that a human can.” [Glossary].
Generative AI, on the other hand, is simply a system built with a neural network approach to AI, in which content is produced (LLM, text-to-image generators, etc.).
How exactly does generative AI learn? There are three main phases:
Pre-training: Pre-training the model is the initial learning phase, in which an incredible amount of data is used to train the entire foundation of the generative AI model.
Fine-tuning: Fine-tuning is the phase in which humans intervene to help refine the results generated by the neural networks.
Embeddings: In short, an embedding is a method in which a synthetic material generated by the machine is fed back into the neural network in order to fine-tune it.