I’d like to share my perspective on artificial intelligence and why I believe it’s so important for everyone to understand how to leverage it.
My experience with machine learning started in 2020 by enhancing natural language processing (NLP) models with custom features engineered to improve classification of content using statistical logistic regression models. At that time, it required considerable effort to build a multi-model pipeline that evaluated our pre-optimized data, applied our custom features to it, vectorized those features so the statistical model can use them, then train that model using example classifications previously done by humans. Overall, the project was a huge success! Our untrained naive models started off with an accuracy percentage in the upper 70’s to low 80’s. By the time we were done, we were classifying content with 96% accuracy.
As we head into 2025, large language models (LLM) have become a viral topic across every industry with organizations scrambling to find ways to utilize them.
If it’s not clear as to why, that manual machine learning work I kicked off my AI career with has been immensely streamlined by LLMs! Today, you can simply pass the raw content into an LLM and it will do an amazing job of classifying it. If you need better performance, providing it with domain knowledge to improve accuracy is a breeze.
What I love most is that if I want to know what an LLM needs to perform a task, I just ask it. If I think it’s wrong, I ask it to double check it’s work and it will correct it.
Considering that an LLMs are essentially highly advanced versions of what I was working on in 2020, they can handle the NLP and classification tasks using a single model to predict and generate coherent, contextually relevant text. Add in the fact that they are trained on massive amounts of internet data to understand human language, it’s no surprise they are as intelligent as they have proven to be.
Humanity’s Fear
It’s understandable that this new technology can freak people out. I’ve even had someone comment on an AI generated animation I posted on my YouTube channel asking me to not promote the use of AI.
Honestly, that made me sad.
I see the rise of AI as a natural progression of technology. Computers were scary to many in the 1980’s. The internet scared people back in the 1990’s, and they weren’t wrong. Not everything about the internet has been good. But look how much we’ve gained from our technical progress!
AI is still in it’s infancy, and those of us working with it on a daily basis are still wrapping our heads around how we can benefit from it.
Just like the internet, there will be some negative results that we’ll experience.
I encourage you to remember that it’s not the technology that’s bad, it’s the humans that are interacting with it. Some have negative intentions, while others allow the technology to influence them in negative ways.
Those are human specific conditions that are far more challenging to mange than the technology itself!
Embrace New Technology
If you look at AI as an extension of human intelligence, it combines our collective knowledge into something you can utilize to enhance your individual understanding of the world and reduce the need to manually perform mundane tasks.
Consider how the Renaissance came to be as we transitioned out of the Middle Ages, thanks to various human advancements. Why couldn’t AI become something that leads to humans having more free time and prosperity?
My latest role in my day job is to leverage my technical expertise to make AI more accessible to non-technical users. Some of them have a fear of it taking over their jobs, so my goal is to help them find ways to let the “bots” takes on the robotic tasks within their role, freeing up time for them to utilize their human creativity to advance organizational progress.
The AI Generated animation that I mentioned posting on YouTube earlier was an experiment to test GPT-4o’s creativity. At first, I was amazed! But, it didn’t take long before the limitations of it’s creativity became obvious. The content had little variation, so I started using different SDXL models to add some visual variation for my audience.
Here’s the video I made that started my exploration:
Here’s the playlist of resulting GPT-4o animation shorts:
For me, that experiment strengthened my view of AI as a tool. It still needs us to handle what it can’t do well. It is an extension, not a replacement. I’m not saying that it won’t ever get to a point where it doesn’t need us, but I’ll cross that bridge if and when we get there.
So far, any technology that humans have created, regardless of the category it falls in, have become valuable tools. Even something as simple as a hammer and nails – look what we can do with such rudimentary technology!
Still…if you’re not comfortable using a hammer, you can’t do much with it. Those who became experts are the builders of the world we live in today. Also, remember that people who choose to use hammers to do harm are the problem, not the hammer itself.
I personally see AI in it’s current state at humanity’s stone hammer. Eventually, we’ll use that to build our AI version of a stone wheel, which will help us progress even further with much greater speed.
Conclusion
My intent in this article is to encourage you to embrace AI and become as familiar with it as much you can.
If it frightens you, get to know it. Learn how to control and use it.
Even if you don’t work with code, you can still leverage it. If you want to learn code, it can teach you.
In fact, if there’s anything you want to learn, it’s a great place to get started! Ultimately, It is a result of our collective intelligence and is being made available for all to explore with good reason.
Just be a good human and don’t use it to do bad things 😉
