Tag: Edge

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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.

PE_Artificial-Inteligence

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.

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Bookmarking & browsers

At the meeting yesterday someone, I believe it could have been John, asked how you could move bookmarks from one browser to another. It’s a good question, and I’ll try and answer it below, but perhaps an alternative answer is even better and that’s what this post will also address. But first, exporting and importing bookmarks for the common browsers.

However Microsoft has been changing it’s browsers quite a bit over the past couple of years. Internet Explorer was phased out for a bespoke re-write which was called Edge; this in turn was then completely re-engineered to use the same Chromium platform as Google Chrome, Brave and others, which was called NEW Edge. Confusing eh!?

Internet Explorer – read this article [Internet Explorer 11 was the default browser for Windows 10, but you may find that it’s been replaced in one of its automatic upgrades by Edge]. For all older versions of Internet Explorer including ones for versions of Windows older than Windows 10 – you might like to look at this article.

Edge – if you’ve got the NEW Edge browser rather than the old legacy EDGE version (which should still be on your machine, as should Internet Explorer 11, if you’re running Windows 10) – this is probably the easiest way of exporting your bookmarks/favourites from a Microsoft browser. Alternatively you should look to see how you can run Internet Explorer if you’ve got the OLD Edge installed on Windows 10. Then you could use the notes above for Exporting from Internet Explorer. Alternatively upgrade either of them to NEW Edge and use the first link in this paragraph to export your Favourites. Simples!

Note: Exported Microsoft Favourites (Bookmarks) are stored as .htm (HTML) files.

If you’re using Brave this article explains how you can Import and Export Bookmarks.

There must be a better way, and there is! You could use a third-party application such as Evernote, which can not only store Bookmarks, but also whole articles through the installation of a Browser Extension which allows you to “clip” content to a “note” in your Evernote datastore held in the cloud. Evernote has long been a favourite piece of software of mine and I pay an annual subscription to get an extended service from it, but there is a really good free version which you can use to trial it and see if you like it. The screen shot shows that you can save the whole article, or just part of it. [One great feature is that it only saves the article, not the additional content, sidebars, panels, etc which often hold ads.]

Alternatively, you could use a Bookmark Manager such as diigo. Again this sits as an extension in your Browser and every time you want to save the link to a website, you click on the diigo extension, and perhaps add some tags to help you find the site at a later date …

… and after pressing Save Bookmark, it saves the page with a brief excerpt …

Finally there’s Pocket which combines bookmarking with a facility for offline reading of webpages. This used to be a great feature when trains didn’t have good WiFi and you could catch-up on your reading, but it’s still a very useful way of storing web content for reading away from the Internet and it’s the way I store all articles that I come across that I’m going to use in Computer Group meetings. Again, you can install a browser extension for all the major browsers that makes it very easy just to click on a webpage and it’s immediately saved and synchronised to any device that has Pocket running on it.

Looking at the bar in the browser above (Brave) you can see icons for LastPass, Pocket, Feedly, diigo, Evernote, AdBlock Plus, GoFullPage (full page screen shot), Push to Kindle, and Flipboard plus the extension to open the Extensions Library. Of course the screen shots for an Android or iOS device would be different; these are just taken from a browser running on a desktop or laptop.

Extensions are really neat, BUT only install ones from the Extensions Library of your Browser. Generally Chrome Extensions will work in Brave. That’s probably a topic for another post at some later date.

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Another Windows 10 Update / Internet Explorer

This update apparently was because I’m using an old version of Windows 10 (?!), which won’t be supported after November (?! again).  Once again I had a hint one was on the way, because a few times last week I lost control of the cursor, presumably as the update was being downloaded.  It was finally installed this morning, taking about an hour.
On another matter, a member of the Photography Group had some trouble logging in to some sites, and finally took her laptop in to the shop she bought it from.  It turns out she was still using Internet Explorer as her browser, which is now past its ‘use by’ date.  She is now using Firefox, (but as we know, other browsers are available).  Does that help anybody?
 

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"Just google it …"

Something I’ve only just recently become aware of is that people don’t know the difference between Google and an internet browser. Now this is a spectacular success for Google (the company) and drives their revenues up a lot, but means that users are potentially missing out on a lot in terms of their internet experience so this short note attempts to address that balance, albeit in a very small way!

How did this come about? Well principally because Google introduced an app for the iPhone and other smartphones and tablets called (unsurprisingly) … Google. It presents in a nice easy to use interface a way of searching for information on the internet – that is how Google started after all, which is how they also managed to corner the term for searching the internet – “just google it”. [You don’t hear many people saying – “just bing it”, or “just yahoo! it” – in fact in the case of the latter they just gave up and decided to use the Google search engine and ditch their own one.] So … at a stroke, new users to digital devices thought that the way to connect to the internet was through their “Google” app.
No, no – there is another way that presents you with so many other possibilities and no, no – you don’t have to restrict yourself to using just Google as your search tool. [In an earlier post I described some experiments with using DuckDuckGo and other search engines and I will return to that subject at another time.] So … what might you use?
Well even using Google’s Chrome browser is better than using the Google app on your smartphone or tablet. It probably uses the same software  “under the hood” based on Google’s Open Source Chromium code base but it does offer the possibility of adding extensions, and allowing the use of alternative search engines.
But what else could you use? On my iOS (Apple mobile devices) I tend to use Apple’s Safari browser. On my desktop/laptop I tend to use Chrome, or Firefox (another Open Source project) from the Mozilla Foundation. Then there’s Microsoft’s Edge – supplied with Windows, or Opera (a lean,  clean browsing machine), or I could be really radical and use something like Brave (and I am) which doesn’t track my browsing history … but I’ll leave that for another day, and for another post.
For today, the message is simple … don’t use the Google app as your main internet browser, just use it if you want to for simple searches. Find a browser you like and use that … and maybe even choose which search engine to use, it doesn’t need to be Google – I’m using Chrome with DuckDuckGo as I write this. You won’t regret making a change to your internet browsing/searching experience – believe me!