Weekly poll: do you use AI and what do you do with it?

18 February 2024

Decades can be defined by buzzwords. If you are of a certain age, you will have grown up hearing the “information superhighway” more times than you can count. But the 90s are over and the Internet is old news – it’s all about AI now.

Things are moving fast as multiple companies are competing on multiple fronts. Yesterday, Google announced Gemini 1.5, claiming that it has finally beaten OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Meanwhile, OpenAI announced Sora, a text to video generation system that is scary good. Also, Nvidia passed Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Amazon in market valuation.

So, you’ve definitely heard about AI. You most probably have seen AI generated content. But have you used AI yourself? How often and what did you do with it?

Image generation was one of the first branches of modern AI to become popular. The Galaxy S24 and Pixel 8 series use AI to edit images – the usual example is removing objects and people from the scene of just moving them around. You can even generate images from scratch with things like the S24’s generative wallpapers.

Image generation has another use case exemplified by Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling, but it’s on mobile too with things like Qualcomm’s Game Super Resolution that was announced last year. In 2023 Apple launched Metal FX (based on AMD’s FidelityFX).

What else? AI is great at translation – in fact, transformers (no, not that kind, the transformers as the “T” in “GPT”) were popularized by a machine translation paper written by Google researchers. Naturally, Google launched the Pixel Buds Pro with real-time translation. Samsung is working on a live translation and interpretation features for the Galaxy Buds series too.

AI’s language skills get put to use for transcribing spoken words – it’s good enough to replace your keyboard. Not only that, but once transcription is done, the AI can summarize the whole thing too. On the flip side, it can also turn text into speech – some browsers can read out lengthy articles to you or you can use it to make your own audio book.

And then there is the good old chat bot – better than Cleverbot, still not HAL 9000. But some use it to replace Internet search, others use it to help with work or homework, some use it just for fun.

Well, how often do you use AI?

And if you answered positively above, what do you do with AI? Note: you can pick multiple answers.