According to a Forbes report, the increase in the use and potential of Artificial Intelligence in the tech workplace and workforce is the big trend to follow in 2024 and the years to come.
Joel Basart, president of the STC Canada West Coast Chapter and with 30 years of experience in the technical field, led a webinar to share how AI impacts his role as a technical content specialist at Telemetry TV. The small company employs automation and chatbots and is mandated to use AI in about 30% of its business.
Joel began the webinar by explaining the basics of AI and how he uses a specific AI model (ChatGPT) daily and used ChatGPT to define AI as the simulation of human intelligence by machines, made of four key components:
• Machine learning
• Natural language processing
• Computer vision
• Robotics
He emphasized why he considers machine learning the most significant component, “it involves training algorithms to learn from data and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed for specific tasks. That probably doesn’t mean a lot to many people, but machine learning is a crucial element of the whole idea behind AI.”
Next, Joel pointed out the wide range of applications of AI, from simple algorithms to power search engines to advanced systems used in autonomous vehicles and health care.
Joel went over how new AI is: “Although it’s been around for a while, only since 2022 have we had this idea of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI.” He then provided examples of challenges and opportunities for improvement in AI.
Joel shared how AI assists his daily work. He uses it for:
• Research: he asks questions when he finds terms that are not easy to understand.
• Email template creation: he customizes templates according to context and occasion.
• Content writing: he runs pieces of content he wrote through ChatGPT to clean them up.
• Image creation: he creates images from a prompt.
• Automated customer response generation: he trains the customer service AI to better respond to customers’ chat comments.
He also listed what tasks he does not assign to AI:
• Give ChatGPT a few bullet points and let it write the content. He believes it is unethical for a writer to do so, and correcting the output takes longer than writing the content himself.
• Take the ChatGPT output and use it in his company’s documentation.
• Create anything with an AI model and pass it off as his own: “While I drove the creation of [the content], I didn’t create it.”
Joel finished the webinar by discussing with the attendees the need for constraints and regulations to ensure the responsible use of AI while acknowledging its potential to enhance productivity.
Missed the webinar?
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Ernesto Campo is a freelance writer with a background in journalism, marketing, and public relations living in Calgary, Alberta. He recently got his Technical Writing Extension Certificate at Mount Royal University. He is also an author of children’s literature and short stories.