At the UK’s AI Safety Summit in 2023, Elon Musk told British prime minister Rishi Sunak that artificial intelligence (AI) was likely to be ‘the most disruptive force in history’. And if you look around you, it isn’t hard to see signs of that disruption already taking place.
We’re eagerly talking away to AI-powered digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa, university lecturers are complaining about students using AI chatbots to write their essays, and fears are growing that a range of jobs – from contract lawyer and computer coder to accountant and even teacher – will either cease to exist or change beyond recognition. Engineering designers are using AI to create new products; architects are using it to design outlandish new buildings and medical researchers are using it to cure disease.
WHAT IS AI?
Artificial intelligence is an umbrella term for technologies that enable computers to behave as though they are intelligent, using complex algorithms to ‘learn’ how best to process data in order to provide the answer that the user requires. There are different types of AI, but the form that has captured the zeitgeist is known as generative AI, which, as
