Important features of generative AI

When asked to list the most important capability of GenAI applications, ChatGPT, which is arguably the most popular GenAI application in existence, said the following:

Content Creation: Generative AI can craft text, images, music, and even videos. It can pen articles, generate realistic images from textual descriptions, compose music, and create video content, opening endless possibilities for creative industries.

That response took 1.5 seconds to generate, and most people would agree with it. GenAI applications can create content for you and your users with lightning speed. Whether it’s text, video, images, artwork, or even Java code, GenAI is able to easily draft foundational content that can then be edited by professionals.

But there are other key features of GenAI applications that merit calling out as well:

• Language translation: With remarkable proficiency, GenAI can translate languages in real time, preserving context and nuance, and facilitating seamless communication across linguistic barriers.
• Personalization: In the realm of marketing and customer service, GenAI can tailor experiences and content to individual users. When given proper context, it can analyze preferences and behaviors to deliver personalized recommendations, emails, and customer interactions.
• Simulation and modeling: In scientific research and engineering, GenAI can simulate complex systems and phenomena. It aids in predicting molecular behaviors, climate patterns, and even economic trends by generating realistic models based on vast datasets.
• Data augmentation: For ML, GenAI can produce synthetic data to augment training sets. This is invaluable in scenarios where real data is scarce or biased, allowing for the creation of diverse and balanced datasets to improve model performance. This is incredibly useful for testing purposes, particularly in software testing.

And perhaps most importantly, it can accept prompting in natural language (such as in English) to do these tasks. This makes performing tasks you previously found difficult incredibly easy. You may use GenAI to accomplish multiple and varied tasks in a day, such as reviewing a pull request, guiding you through some tasks for Golang, and generating illustrations for the interior artwork of a book.

Why use generative AI?

Each of the preceding abilities is compelling and important, and when used correctly and in combination, revolutionary. Put simply, there is no industry where GenAI cannot play a role. By rapidly aggregating and summarizing a wide range of content and simplifying searching, GenAI improves the user experience of finding ideas and building knowledge. It can help gather new information, summarize it, and recraft it into content. It can help speed up or even automate administrative tasks, and exponentially increase output.

But beyond all of that, the experience of using GenAI is an order of magnitude better than what is available today. Consider, for example, a customer service bot. Many of you will be familiar with this flow:

1. The customer first encounters a long menu of options: If you want to talk to sales or support, press 1. For billing, press 2. For administration, press 3. For orders, press 4.. When the customer has a question that does not neatly fit into any category, they may press 4 anyway.
2. Upon pressing 4, they are then routed to a support page that does not have the answer they seek. They click a button that says, No, this did not answer my question.
3. They search the knowledge base themselves, perhaps never finding the answer and reaching out via phone.

Imagine being able to type what you wanted and the bot responding in a natural way—not routing you to a page but just giving you the answer. Imagine even further that the user can then chat with the bot to say they want to modify the address on their order, and the bot is able to do that from within the chat window, having a multi-step dialogue with the user to confirm and record their new information.

It is a wholly new, more pleasing experience for the customer!

The ethics and risks of GenAI

Despite those benefits, there are risks and concerns about the use of AI. In some fields, the outcry against AI is substantial and has merit. Art generated by AI, for example, flooded the internet’s marketplaces, displacing artists and illustrators who make their living off their craft. There are questions about whether using AI to write a book gives a person the right to call themselves an author. There are no clear-cut answers here; from our own experience, the authors of this book believe that GenAI accelerates, rather than replaces, the existing paradigms of work done today. But that may not always remain true. As AI improves, it may be more likely to replace the humans who are using it.

The risks of GenAI are considerable, and some of them are not well understood. Even the ones that are well understood, such as hallucinations, are difficult to identify for users, and harder still to combat. You can read more about the challenges of GenAI in Chapter 11, Common Failures of Generative AI, along with recommendations on how to mitigate them in Chapter 12, Correcting and Optimizing Your Generative AI Application.