Tag: AI

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Notes of meeting – 26th September (Amazon)

In David’s absence the meeting was led by Jonathan and Phil.

Amazon and Online retailing

Jonathan introduced the topic of online shopping offering a number of reasons why we might want to moderate our shopping with Amazon. His primary concern was the impact of Amazon, and other online retailers, on our local shopping centres –  such as the loss of over 1000 bookshops in UK since Amazon came on the scene. He mentioned his many efforts over the last year or so  trying to persuade members of the U3A’s Ukulele Group to first try  our local  music shops rather than Amazon on the basis of “ use it or lose it” . And the reason he had raised it here now was  news that we have now lost it  – in the form of  Gamlin’s music shop in the City Centre – due to close the following day!

Rather than summarising Jonathan’s main points here ( and to avoid accusations of bias! ) he has taken Ian’s advice in asking AI for “ reasons to consider alternatives to  Amazon “. Gemini’s conclusions are reproduced below!

There was a healthy discussion in response which was almost universally in favour of shopping with Amazon! Jonathan just hopes that members will remember that “ other retailers are available”!

Reasons to Consider Alternatives to Amazon (Gemini AI)

While Amazon offers convenience and a vast product selection, there are several reasons why some people choose to shop elsewhere:

Ethical and Environmental Concerns:

  • Worker Treatment: Amazon has faced criticism for its treatment of workers, including long hours, low wages, and demanding quotas.
  • Environmental Impact: The company’s rapid growth and reliance on shipping have raised concerns about its carbon footprint and impact on packaging waste.
  • Anti-competitive Practices: Some argue that Amazon’s dominance in the market can stifle competition and harm smaller businesses.

Supporting Local Economies:

  • Community Impact: Shopping locally can help support your community by keeping money within your area.
  • Personal Relationships: Building relationships with local businesses can provide personalized service and a sense of connection.

Privacy and Data Concerns:

  • Data Collection: Amazon collects a significant amount of customer data, which can raise privacy concerns.
  • Targeted Advertising: The company uses this data to personalize ads and offers, which can be intrusive for some.

Product Quality and Authenticity:

  • Counterfeit Products: While Amazon has measures in place to combat counterfeit goods, there is still a risk of purchasing fake or low-quality items.

Alternative Shopping Experiences:

  • Supporting Independent Businesses: Shopping from smaller businesses can help promote diversity and innovation.
  • In-Person Shopping: Visiting physical stores can provide a more immersive and tactile shopping experience.

Ultimately, the decision of whether or not to shop with Amazon is a personal one. By considering these factors, you can make an informed choice that aligns with your values and preferences.

Apple “Notes”.                                                                                                                          

Phil briefed the group on the Notes app available on Apple devices along with further anecdotes about life with an electronic can opener.

“With Notes, you can capture a quick thought, create checklists, sketch ideas and more. And with iCloud, you can keep your notes updated across all of your devices.”

Any other business

Tony mentioned a laptop problem he had and asked for advice on how to fix it. “We will fix your PC “ was the  universal reply!                                                  

39 Lambourne Crescent, Cardiff Business Park, Llanishen, CF14 5GG. 

07999 056 096   or   02920 766 039.

Email neil@wewillfixyourpc.co.uk

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Notes of meeting – 27th June

Iain and Phil hosted the meeting. Thanks to Iain for providing these notes …

My brief notes area as follows:

Amazon Fire Tablet review

Phil Edwards gave an amusing but thorough review of the Amazon Fire tablet family.  His conclusion was that were perfect for consuming eBooks and videos etc.  This is especially true for people who have an Amazon Prime account.  The tablets are particularly cheap during Amazon’s Prime Day sales.  The combination of low price and reasonable functionality made them “shiny enough” in Phil’s view.

Iain King reviewed the articles added to Thought Grazing since the previous meeting.  

AI Bias: with data and without

Iain King showed a  couple of pictures generated by AI for a poster for the Llandaff Over 50s Club.  The Secretary of the Club was not pleased with AI’s representation of Llandaff’s Over 50s.  Iain drew attention to the book Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. This highlights how an absence of data disadvantages women in a wide range of fields e.g. medicine, car safety etc.  The absence of data on which to train AI risks exacerbating this disadvantage.

… and he added this Postscript – “(Typed on a Linux PC !)” – congratulations!!!

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Notes of Meeting – 8th February

We started off the meeting with a welcome to Chris Morgan; we hope he enjoys the anarchy that is Digital Matters – we put on a good show of that yesterday. Was it because Mario had chosen to attend for his first meeting this session? Seriously though, it was good to see you. We had apologies from Jo, Jonathan, Renee, Iain and Nita but still we had 18 present, only 1 down on the Artificial Intelligence session two weeks before. We thanked again, Jonathan, Iain and Phil for their contributions. I gave a brief summary of how the meeting had gone and asked if anyone wished to amend or add to the blogpost which I would then de-personalise and post on the Cardiff u3a website.

Between the meetings Iain had sent me details of a newsletter from Benedict Evans that he monitors from time to time. I’ve now signed up to get a weekly email of what he’s been “up to” – it certainly looks an interesting website. Iain was at the Google ADC (accessibility design centre) in London, and has offered to put his thoughts on his visit on the site. We’ll look forward to hearing from him at the next meeting.

On Signal, Ian (Cortical Silence) posted an observation on Artificial Intelligence …

“Generative AI has increased fraud risk.

(1) AI can tailor content, correct typos and grammatical errors, thereby reducing ability to spot fakes

(2) AI automates the work so victims can be targeted faster and further

(3) AI can mimic humans’ voice, image and video to dupe family and friends

We should expect more convincing phishing attempts, more frequent attempts, and deep fake impersonations (even Taylor Swift has fallen foul).

The traditional markers of scams are beginning to disappear.
The more content we place online the greater the risk of it being scraped, analysed and abused.

It is time to batten down the hatches.“

All observations that should be noted carefully, but we must surely still look towards the positives, the advantages of enhanced searching, and the ability to replace repetitive tasks, for instance.

I then went on to explain that I wanted to distinguish two classes of content for our Forums on Thought grazing (here) and that which would be posted on the Flipboard magazine of the same name. I intend to put news items that have a limited interest life on Flipboard, and try to put items that might be classified as useful for later reference in the most appropriate Forum as a Topic for members to comment, or reply, on. I then quickly went through the news items on Flipboard, and showed the Forums and recent Topics I’d recently posted on this website. I hope that you find the distinction helpful and I do encourage more of you to become Contributors to Flipboard, and Participants on Forums.

I recommended that members experiment with Forums by posting something to the “chit chat area”, and I demonstrated how to do it.

I have recently updated what I called (for the old Computer Group) a Toolkit. It’s embedded below and I’ll attach it to a Beacon email for you to download and print.

We then looked at Members’ issues.

Margaret described a strange experience she had been having with the BBC website, where she had chosen to read the News page in Welsh but that an auto-translation had then been generated which defeated her having made the choice in the first place. She was also getting a message that adblock was not working and the surmise was that Google Chrome was blocking a page if it was a different language than the default set. Sianed offered the solution of using two browsers, one for English, one for Welsh (which she did) to get round this issue.

Sheila alerted us to an issue concerning a passport application photo (taken in a booth) which appeared to show her with her mouth open – a consideration the Passport Office apparently doesn’t care for. She alerted them to the fact that she was an “elderly person” (joke!) finding the online application challenging and got her passport issued. Good outcome, and reminiscent of me being waved through border control at quick speed because I had a walking stick!!!!

Phil asked us if we’d heard of Elon Musk’s advocacy for implanting a chip in our brain to aid paraplegics and help to operate robot limbs. The future certainly looks interesting and one can see the real advantages of such work, but what about telepathy, and instant messaging from one implanted chip to another! Scary world ahead!!!

Chris asked if we knew any way of disposing of old technology (phones, laptops etc) safely and securely. I suggested that taking the hard disk out of a computer and smashing it was almost certainly secure; we remembered the offer from Curry’s to re-cycle old technology, but how would that handle the RAM on an old phone. After the meeting it was confirmed that a Factory Reset would wipe a phone completely and securely. This article from Which? gives useful advice and suggestions on how to handle old technology. For further suggestions, type “Disposing of old technology safely and securely” into your favourite search engine.

Paul was having difficulty with his browser and wanted to Uninstall it and then Reinstall it but it wasn’t available on the Apple Appstore. I suggested that he should first Export his Bookmarks to the Desktop, then drag his browser (Chrome) to the Trash, and then re-install it from the Google website. Many applications on MacOS are not in the appstore, unlike iOS which are “only” (for the moment at least) available from the Appstore.

Jim alerted us to a recent discovery he had made concerning his mobile broadband router (from Three). He’d always been unhappy with the performance of it in his living room, however moving it to his kitchen resulted in a dramatic improvement in throughput. This would appear to be both unsurprising – given the way the device would seek an aerial; and surprising – since you would think within a house there wouldn’t be that degree of variability.

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AI – it’s all the rage!

It was less than 12 months ago that we had a session looking at the emerging technology of Large Learning Models (LLM) and in particular Chat-GPT and Dall-E from Open AI. In fact it was the meeting we had on the 23rd March, and this was the article I created for that meeting; I also put a slightly different version of it on the public Cardiff u3a website. Sianed and I also debated the topic in September, an experience neither of us would willingly go through again!!!! So with so much having happened in such a short period of time, it certainly seemed right to revisit the topic and see what’s happened.

First some background, some developments and some resources for you to follow-up, then some notes and content from three member contributions. We have Jonathan, Iain and Phil to thank for these.

What do we mean by Artificial Intelligence. Well, nothing that’s really appeared in the past 15 months it would have to be said. Some articles for you to consider …

Race to AI: the origins of artificial intelligence, from Turing to ChatGPT – in this article from The Guardian the background to what is, and what is not, artificial intelligence is explored and whilst recognising that a step-change has occurred, we have not yet reached the “nirvana” of artificial intelligence.

A simple guide to help you understand AI – in this animated webpage from the BBC, you have the “Janet and John” introduction to artificial intelligence. That’s not meant as an insult in any way, it’s a very straightforward introduction to the subject and if you switch the animations on you will get a full-experience.

It is however the Royal Institution’s Christmas Series of Lectures fronted by Mike Wooldridge that perhaps best defines the scope, the possibilities and the future of artificial intelligence. I seriously recommend that you watch all three lectures on BBC’s iPlayer.

Much of the attention in the past year or so has been focussed on LLM and Chat-GPT. Which? attempts to answer the question – “is it safe to use” in this article, but comes up with more questions than answers, but it does a bit of explaining along the way, but actually the best way to find out what Chat-GPT can do, is to try it yourself, which you can do here, after signing-up for an account on the Open AI servers.

Some experiments and experiences. We kicked-off here with Jonathan telling us about his experience of using Microsoft Copilot.

 Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft has released several AI “Copilots” that can complete different tasks for different purposes. 

  1. At a basic level Copilot can be accessed directly through copilot.microsoft.com where it acts as a kind of Bing-ChatGPT. It can answer questions, create text, jokes, poems, songs and images much as we’ve seen in Chat GPT. When providing information it will reference the source material. And also send you on a shopping spree if you wish!
  2. Copilot is now fully integrated into the Bing search engine and Edge browser. Open Edge from the Windows taskbar to bring up the browser. Copilot is the top icon in the vertical tabs on the right. Clicking on it will open a sidebar which looks much like the page we’ve seen above. A different tab will open the AI Image Creator. Copilot in Edge can work with web pages, for instance generating a summary of complex articles. It will work in chat, compose and insight modes. It offers three conversation styles for your own composition – creative, balanced or precise!
  3. Copilot in Windows is currently being rolled out in Windows 11 updates. It can help with a variety of tasks, both relating to your PC’s settings and to generative assistance. For example, Copilot in Windows can turn on your computer’s dark room, organize your windows, write an essay, help you shop, and more with a simple conversational prompt.
  4. Copilot for Microsoft 365 involves the integration of the Copilot AI assistant into Microsoft’s 365 productivity software family.  For example the suite of Microsoft 365 applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, will be infused with Copilot to optimize workflow, such as generating text and tables in Word, summarizing and drafting emails in Outlook, and generating Python visualizations in Excel. This is clearly a more advanced development of Copilot AI, intended for the business market, currently on offer for £30/month!
  5. There are further business related Copilots for Security, Service and Sales.
  6. All are under continuous development so will no doubt involve rapid change and improvement over time.
  7. Links to some further info are included below.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-microsoft-copilot-heres-everything-you-need-to-know/

https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/148900/hands-on-with-microsoft-copilot-in-windows-11-your-latest-ai-assistant?v=Jfeh_CdKj8k

https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-use-copilot-to-control-windows

Of all the commercial developments in the past year it’s Microsoft that’s led the way, but Google’s working hard to keep-up, first with it’s Bard model, and latterly with it’s Gemini software.

Iain led us through some of the features of Bard and this article indicates the differences between Bard and Chat-GPT. Iain was particularly struck by the way the system seemed to learn from one day to another. An inappropriate response to a question of taking your grandchildren somewhere in Cardiff, had been replaced by a much more acceptable answer. How does this happen? Has it learnt something? Or, is it’s previous answer become part of the resource that it uses to find responses. I guess we’ll never know!!

Since the meeting Iain has also shared with us in the Artificial Intelligence Forum a really interesting and potentially useful use of AI in interpreting scrolls recovered from the eruption of Vesuvius. There are many really useful uses of AI, as the Royal Institution lectures showed us. I aim to add Topics to that Forum over the next few weeks (and months) as they emerge, and I encourage you to do the same.

We then had an illuminating presentation from Phil, that I encourage you to look at.

It starts off with Phil’s interest in Family History and his ancestor’s death from cholera which prompted him to enquire about that epidemic.

He then asked Chat-GPT to write an essay (which he’d had to do in an earlier life) on the topic “Liberal and Utilitarian Educational Thinking in 19th Century Great Britain: A Comprehensive Analysis with Reference to Cardinal Newman”

He felt that the attempt was worth at least a B+

He then shared with us some images created by Image2Go.com not all of which totally hit the brief he’d requested.

In conclusion, I shared a few issues …

Volkswagen says it’s putting ChatGPT in its cars for ‘enriching conversations’ – really? The first recording of a Tesla driver wearing Apple’s Vision Pro headset has already been posted to the internet. Where’s the common sense, in common sense?

A frankly rather surprising Judges in England and Wales are given cautious approval to use AI in writing legal opinions.

A totally unsurprising Britain’s MI6 chief says his spies are using AI to disrupt flow of weapons to Russia.

3 reasons why AIs like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT will only get worse — and why it doesn’t have to be this way – a suggestion that as more and more AI-generated content floods the internet, and as more and more reliable content providers stop the “bots” from trawling their sites, that the quality of information on the web will decrease. AI eating itself is a phrase that might come to mind.

Finally a very thought-proking article – AI Needs to Be Both Trusted and Trustworthy – a theme picked-up by Ian (not Iain) on Signal with his reference to the fact that Chinese academics wary of their reputations have moved towards implementing new guidelines to protect the quality of their research.

I’ve put quite a few articles up on Flipboard in the past couple of months. I aim now to move some of them into the Artificial Intelligence Forum on Thought grazing with a brief commentary, and I invite your replies/comments. I think this move indicates that I will be using the Forum more for reference, and Flipboard more for news. I think that makes sense.