What Different Generations Think About Generative AI

Gen AI has infiltrated our daily lives and it's time to start talking about it

Hiya!

I always love knowing what interests you, so I was thrilled to receive this message:

“I’m interested in AI, and how it’s affecting people who are working. I often wonder/worry how your generation is coping with this sea of change. I know AI is a moving target to research, but if you have insights or experiences regarding how it’s affecting you and your generation, I’d love to see your writing about it.”

What a fantastic curiosity, and I’m happy to discuss it today. I haven’t written much about artificial intelligence (AI), but I have watched its evolution as it spreads from industry to industry over the past few years. It definitely seems like it’s time to stop watching and start discussing the influences AI is having on our daily lives.

Generative AI

As the reader mentioned, AI is a moving target. It’s everywhere, spreading and evolving throughout nearly every industry and demographic. It influences our work, health, education, social media, and more. But today, I want to talk broadly about Generative AI, which I think affects mine and other generations the most right now.

When people used to talk about AI, they mostly meant machine-learning models that are taught to make predictions based on data. For example, a model could be fed millions of human X-ray images and asked to predict whether a specific X-ray shows signs of a tumor. An AI model can also analyze a person’s financial history to estimate their chances of defaulting on a loan.

However, generative AI takes machine learning models to the next level by creating new data rather than being limited to making predictions off a specific dataset. In other words, generative AI systems learn to generate new objects that resemble the data they were trained on.

For instance, you could upload thousands of romance novels and then ask the gen AI system to create a new romance novel using the stories you gave it — which people are already doing and selling.

As a writer myself (and working on my first novel), I’m not a big fan of people using gen AI to compose novels because it feels less authentic. The whole point of reading books is to enter someone else’s mind. I suppose books written entirely by AI take some of the magic away and feel a bit like cheating. That said, I have no qualms with writers using AI as a tool to improve their writing, which I’ll talk more about later.

Anyway, generative AI has exploded in the last few years, especially since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, which Microsoft has since incorporated into its Bing search engine.

ChatGPT and similar systems use large language models to assemble remarkably coherent and fluent texts without understanding what the texts mean — let alone having an opinion about them, which would imply comprehension when there is none. You simply input some parameters or prompts into the system, and it fulfills its tasks using the uploaded data.

For instance, some headlines about AI in the news may have been created by generative AI like ChatGPT. It’s not just large news organizations using gen AI to improve headlines. Anyone writing an article or paper can go to websites like Headline Scheduler by Coschedule to improve a headline’s clickability for free and gain even more AI assistance after subscribing.

Many companies use automated chatbots for customer service — to navigate complaints, answer questions, and more. As chatbot technology grows, these bots sound more and more human.

But all of this barely scratches the surface. Generative AI systems are evolving rapidly, some say too rapidly. While we could talk all day about the growing number of AI-Doomsday possibilities in the news and potential ethical implications, let’s look at what people actually think about generative AI and how it might impact our present and future — minus the doomsday extremes.