30 Jan Interesting Readings
AI Corner - January 2024
— Sumedh Nene
While we were all out partying, and celebrating the dawn of a new year, the AI world continued to blast through cyberspace at full throttle – and it’s not all doom and gloom and layoffs and mass replacement of humans by robots. In our AI roundup for the January edition, we will see what an MIT survey found about the impact of AI on jobs, we will see if and how artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted Google’s dominance in the Search world and finally, we will look at a brand new AI tool for getting your audio in the same voice in many languages. Cool, let’s dive in.
Impact of AI on Jobs – MIT Survey
A lot of us have been scared with the thoughts of being made redundant by the AI now or in the near future. However, fear not – just because AI is out there, doesn’t mean you have to use it! A new study by the MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) did a meticulous examination of the feasibility of using AI for automating specific tasks. It not only assessed the technical performance requirements, but also the characteristics of an AI system that would need to offer the capability of that performance, and the economic will to build and deploy such a system.
The study measured the impact of AI on jobs and found that it didn’t make sense to replace most jobs with AI, EVEN IF the robots did it better and faster than us, mere humans. Why? Because the study concluded that it was simply too freakin’ expensive to design and deploy the AI systems that would replace humans. The study found that even with the huge upfront investments, only about 23% of human tasks would be replaced by AI in a way that made any financial sense. Majority of the companies just don’t have the drive and incentive to throw that kind of money at fancy AI systems. Rejoice humans – the economic feasibility of implementing this technology is not here yet!
This is true even as innovations are being made at warp speed in the AI space. Just to name one, a new tool enables jewelers to use images to instantly establish grade and quality of diamonds without having an experienced jeweler on hand.
Read the full article here.
When is generative AI likely to transform your org?
On another note, I found an interesting graphic by Deloitte that posed the question: “When is generative AI likely to transform your organization and your industry, if at all?” The pie chart reflects the sentiments of organizations and it shows that there is still time to retrain ourselves.
Impact of AI Bots on Google’s dominance over the Search domain
Shifting gears a little to Google’s stronghold on the search space in the world of AI. It’s not often that you hear the world-at-large acknowledge that it got it all wrong. Around this time last year, we were all playing out scenarios of how the genAI was going to disrupt the online search market. We wouldn’t have frowned at anybody for arguing that chatbots answering your most complex queries at a speed of a million words a second, would beat finding a needle in the stack of the suggested blue links. According to StatCounter, however, Google continues to dominate with 92% search market share. The search fraternity still seems to distrust the bots thanks largely to their hallucinations and down right incorrect non-factual data.
Onto our AI tool of the month. I do a lot of videos that require voice overs (VO) and after years of being in this field, I have come to realize that working with human VO artists can at times be more expensive, often tedious and time-consuming. While deepfakes and voice cloning is a current and present threat, investors are betting tens of millions on this space.
ElevenLabs with its $80 million funding is turning out to be a giant in this space. The funding puts the value of the company at over a billion dollars. That’s a lot of dough for a company that’s just about a year old. It creates lifelike voices in browser-based speech generation. You can fine tune the emotion, intonation, and other vocal characteristics. Just go on over their website, enter your text, and have it converted to speech that sounds remarkably close to what a human sounds like, in many different languages.
Well, that’s a wrap. Do let us know in any of the TWT forums what you like or don’t like so much about the AI corner. We’d love to hear from you so we can deliver content that will appeal to you.
About the Author
Sumedh Nene has 20+ years of international experience in Technical Communications. He has worked with Cisco Systems, HP, Philips, TIBCO, Nvidia Graphics, Deutsche Bank and Levis’ in Singapore, Australia, India, USA (Bay Area), and Canada (Toronto).
He has been teaching Technical Writing and mentoring writers for many years. He was the lead instructor at George Brown College in Toronto and Rotman School of Management, Toronto. He was also a visiting faculty for communication-related topics at SIMS, SSIBM, PIBM and Bits Pilani, Roorkee. Sumedh has conducted workshops at Avaya, Siemens, MCCIA, Eclipsys and many other IT MNCs.
Current Role: Technical Writer, Trainer, Editor, Documentation Specialist
Company: CrackerJack WordSmiths Inc.
City: Mississauga, Canada
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