pgm_01

Your Mileage May Vary

That’s how human intelligence works. We assign a value to the source of the information. The fact that the AI’s seemed to be trained without that explains why they “lie” so much. They simply reconstruct patterns without giving any weight to specific patterns.

For example, if you have the information “President Biden will launch a ground invasion of Russia.” If the New York Times, BBC, and CNN are all reporting it, we would give that information a higher likelihood of being true than if the information was found on random blogs. However, if the random blogs reporting the information belonged to reputable reporters or bloggers on military and international affairs, we would assign the information a higher value of being correct than if the information came from Bob’s Bigfoot and Alien sightings Index.

Without the ability to check the level of accuracy of source data, all the generative AI could be corrupted. If you fed an art AI photos of the Statue of Liberty but kept telling it that it was the Eiffel Tower, when asked to draw the Eiffel Tower it would spit out the Statue of Liberty. Right now, without the ability to assess the accuracy of a response, any of the chat-based AI are garbage for most of the use-cases companies are deploying them in.

AI only “knows” what it has been trained on. Since structural racism exists, racism will be present in how AI operates. It does not mean we will have AI Hitler trying to kill Jews, but it might mean things like an AI drawing program defaulting to a white woman when asked to draw a generic woman. It could mean that bias that already exists gets amplified, for example an AI “pre-crime” program targeting Black neighborhoods as potential hotspots while ignoring similar White neighborhoods.

I am currently running KDE Neon 5.27 which is Ubuntu based, on an Inspiron 3551 with an Intel N3540 @ 2.16GHz which is a 4 core Atom,
and 4 GiB of RAM. With this 1 tab of Firefox open, the system is using 2GB of the RAM. I have had no issues running Neon on such a slow system with little RAM, but I don’t usually have many tabs or programs running at the same time. Pretty much all the desktop interfaces for Linux run with far less resources and bloat than Windows, I would start by finding which desktop environment you prefer. I have been a fan of KDE for many years now, but try different bootable distros to get a feel for which interface you would like.

I inherited a crappy laptop (4 core atom processor, with 4 gigs of RAM, fear the power!) because Windows was running slow on it. I decided to try different Linux distros booting from a USB and had no issues. I literally ran the system for months off of a Sandisk USB drive, and it was faster than the spindle drive in the machine.

My recommendation is, don’t cheap out on the USB drive. No-name drives are fine for word files, but the performance increase from a Sandisk, Samsung, Kingston or equivalent is worth it for any media transfers and will work fine for a bootable Linux.