3 ways generative AI is making our world a better place
Are you tired of negative headlines about AI, especially generative AI? Then this article is made for you. Because we’re going to explore three heartwarming examples that showcase the potential of generative AI to make our world better, not worse.
Preserving the Icelandic language
Which country doesn’t love its mother tongue? And yet, in this increasingly digital world – where English and other major languages dominate – smaller languages are at risk of disappearing. This is a particular concern for the country of Iceland. Most of Iceland’s approximately 370,000 citizens speak English or another language, which, coupled with the rapid digitalization of Icelanders’ daily activities, could potentially endanger the country’s rich native language.
The problem is not so much the lack of locally developed software for the Icelandic language, but rather the integration of the Icelandic language into global software and applications that Icelanders use daily, such as social media, news sites or e-commerce sites. So the Icelandic government has collaborated with OpenAI and is using the GPT-4 language model to help preserve the Icelandic language. (As an aside, the country also has a language planning department that comes up with Icelandic terms for new innovations instead of adopting “loan words” from other languages. For example, a computer is called “tölva” or “prophetess of numbers.”)
When it comes to using generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the underlying models are trained on large swathes of text across the internet, meaning much of the training data is in English and other widely spoken languages. In the case of a language like Icelandic, the linguistic model does not have the same capabilities, which often results in errors and incorrect cultural context. To help change this, a team of language technology companies and volunteers trained GPT-4 on proper Icelandic language, grammar and cultural knowledge.
This gives Icelanders the ability to interact with OpenAI tools in fluent Icelandic. Additionally, this means that Icelandic businesses can have an Icelandic speaking chatbot on their website instead of having to rely on an English speaking chatbot. All of this contributes to helping the language survive in the digital age. OpenAI hopes this collaboration will pave the way for GPT-4 to help preserve other languages around the world.
Free audiobooks from the Project Gutenberg open audiobook collection
I don’t know about you, but I love audiobooks when I’m traveling, walking, or just want to give my eyes a break. But creating audiobooks can be an expensive and time-consuming process, requiring the author or a professional narrator to narrate the entire book. But thanks to generative AI, it is now possible to automatically generate audio content from written text – and even with a human-sounding voice.
This makes it easy to create audiobooks of beloved classics and make them freely available to the public, which was the idea behind Project Gutenberg’s Open Audiobook Collection. Project Gutenberg – the oldest digital library of e-books, established in 1971 – collaborated with Microsoft to turn 5,000 books into free audiobooks, all narrated by AI-generated (but human-sounding) voices using the technology speech synthesis. The books are all in the public domain and include classic works by William Shakespeare, Jules Verne and TS Eliot. You can access it through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. The project was named one of Best inventions of 2023 by Time Magazine.
Helping people who are blind or visually impaired
Be My Eyes is a Danish startup created in 2012 with the aim of creating technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. The Be My Eyes app connects blind people with online volunteers who can help them with everyday tasks, like identifying a product on a store shelf.
Today, Be My Eyes is working with OpenAI to create the Virtual Volunteer powered by GPT-4, a chat and image-to-text recognition tool that can generate the same level of context and understanding as a human volunteer. All of this is possible thanks to GPT-4’s new visual input capability, which allows the model to recognize and interpret images.
It is this combination of image recognition and GPT-4’s powerful language capabilities that is particularly useful since users will not only be able to get help identifying a product or item, but they will also be able to have a conversation at this subject. As OpenAI explains, it’s the difference between a basic image recognition tool that recognizes an object on the ground as a ball and a tool that communicates to the user that not only is it a ball, but that It could pose a tripping hazard, so be careful. . In one example, a user was able to navigate a train system using the Virtual Volunteer, getting details about where they were and instructions on how to get where they needed to go.
But the Be My Eyes Virtual Volunteer isn’t just designed to help users navigate the physical world. It can also help people understand what’s happening online – in a simpler and more intuitive way than existing “screen reader” tools, which can be cumbersome and slow to use. So a user can show the tool a web page, and it will determine which parts of the page to read and which parts can be summarized. As you can imagine, this can make it much easier to access news or use cluttered sites like e-commerce sites.
Are there any challenges and concerns around generative AI? You bet there are. But as these examples show, generative AI can be a powerful force for good. If we let him.
