Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around since a very long time (1940’s or more) but many people didn’t pay attention to it until the recent advent of chatGPT, a generative AI that is disrupting stereotypes.
In a simple word, Artificial Intelligence is the process of training a machine to act similarly to a human.

What makes AI very interesting and captivating to us is the ability to communicate with it in a way you are communicating with a friend.

Now, go to ChatGPT (by open AI) or Gemini (by Google). Type, “Hi, I don’t know what to eat today, can you suggest for me, I am an African” You will be surprised at the reply you get.

That is the power of AI!
ChatGPT uses a Generative Pre-Trained Transformer and was released on November 20, 2022. ChatGPT reached 1 million users in a week. Meaning people are now vast with the use of technological innovations. Although, most African countries were slow to adapt to the changes.
AI has several uses and advantages in which I will mention few;

• You can create beautiful images that look very real with AI. Those images could have human portraits. Thanks to AI, you can use images in your project without having to worry about the owner of the image. One of the AI Apps to do this is Midjourney.

•  AI can be used to create websites from scratch. Yes, you can create an effective website within a few minutes by prompting AI. Instead of using many hours to create a website. An example of this is WIX AI website builder.

• AI can be used in creating beautiful videos within 5 minutes by using prompt (a text in the form of requesting AI to do something for you).

• AI is very good at predictions. Have you experienced a situation whereby you are typing some words with your phone keyboard and it’s already suggesting some words for you even before concluding the word? That’s AI at work, it has memorized all what you type in the past and trained itself by those data, then used it in predicting what you wanted to type.

• AI can be used in coding, solving complex mathematical problems within a very short minute.

• AI can be used to write a 1000 page book in a few minutes. Can a human do that within that short timeline?

• AI can be used to summarize massive data.

• AI can help you to generate a meeting summary, during a discussion you were not able to attend and give you the details and key points you need.

• As a business owner, AI can help you reply to your customers while you are asleep. This
means it’s carrying out your business schedule even in your sleep?

If I continue listing all the benefits of Artificial Intelligence, I may not finish in a day.

All that I mentioned above shows that Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. AI isn’t something professionals or business owners should be scared of. See AI as your partner in progress, not a threat. AI won’t take your Job, it will only add to your creativity. AI with help you carry out massive work within a short period, so that you can have time to focus on other things that matters to you.
Note that, AI won’t take your Job, only if you are open to upgrading your skills and not part of the people that don’t accept change.

The Ethical Use of AI and other issues around it

As useful as Artificial Intelligence is, we have to use it Wisely and Safely.
Currently, Copyright doesn’t affect AI because whatever you generate is solely for you. But stay away from using images that are similar to popular legends and use neutral AI results.
As good as AI is, it lies. Yes it lies. This is called (AI Hallucination). AI Hallucination is when an AI tool gives a closely wrong answer instead of not answering you at all.
The solution to this is that, make sure you check any results you get from AI again, incase of any error.
Deep Fake is also a rising issue around AI. Deep fake is the manipulation of a photo, video, or audio clip using AI to portray events that never happened. This could be used to create a massive damage in the society if we are not careful. Imagine people using deep fake to create a video of a speech given by a popular Legend, whereby such speech didn’t exist in reality.

Remember, AI can’t work alone without humans. We feed data into AI and we are also the users of the end result. AI needs us to survive and we need AI to be more creative, innovative and become an agent of the change we desire in the future.