Smart Devices and AI
I missed class Tuesday (4/18), but the topic of Smart Devices is very interesting to me since I know there are huge privacy concerns surrounding them. However, personally, I just tell myself how everything that has internet access is collecting data on me and selling it, so how are smart devices any different. My dad has worries about our Alexa collecting data on us and mutes the mic on it when it is not actively being used. While I understand the concern, I guess growing up in the digital age has somewhat desensitized me to the information websites and apps collect. As long as my social security number is not out there in the open, I’m pretty relaxed about things, in all honesty. One type of Smart Device I do not fully understand the purpose of is the smart fridge, but that is more of an aside from this topic.
As for class last Thursday, our discussion on Generative AI was very interesting. I loved the activity for us to test out using one of the AI generators and discuss what we created with the class. My only peeve was that ChatGPT asked for a lot of information before being able to use their platform, which made me feel a bit wary since I am not that used to AI websites. Testing it out was interesting, especially when it came to asking it a Historic Preservation question of “what are the different types of brick bonds” and it took about 10-15 minutes to put together a full answer. Seeing the Picsart AI results from some of my peers was unsettling, to say the least. The Picsart AI brought up the recent discussion of if AI art can be considered art, which a majority of the class seemed to agree it is not. Most of us were saying if there is no human creativity behind a piece, aside from the command text block, then it is not really art since the program is doing majority of the work. Another engaging conversation was about how AI treats race since I had not considered the fact if it is pulling from biased sources then it will also display bias.
