Sir, – William Hunt (Letters, November 16th) is rightly sceptical of the claims around AI, and the rash of new businesses springing up touting the same.
I would like to give one example of its use which benefits both business and the ordinary person.
The online Irish Statute Book contains all the laws passed by the Oireachtas which govern our country, plus some pre-1922. Searching for a specific item is not easy.
I took “selection for redundancy” in “collective redundancy” under Irish law. I got nothing until I removed “selection for redundancy”. That brought me to a section of the Employment Act 2007 and a European Act of 1996. I then had to pick what I wanted out of those texts (not easy) and try and make sense of them.
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My AI buddy, when I asked “How has collective redundancy been governed in Irish law ?”, gave me a half-page answer, very neatly laid out (referencing the 2007 Act above).
I then asked “What are the allowable methods for selecting employees for redundancy ?” and got a similar result, neatly laid out. This answer outlined the methods, legal requirements and the pitfalls of redundancy selection.
Yes, all results have to be treated with caution, but this applies equally to old-fashioned searches. Recently I used AI to help me remove a malware virus from my laptop. In following the very detailed instructions it gave me, I made a mistake or two. It determined that I had missed out a step and guided me back there. The malware is gone, and I’m happy.
These are small examples of a layman’s use of AI on static information. It saved me a lot of time. The use of AI on real-time data, and applying it to automation, is mind-boggling – Yours, etc,
TONY BRADY,
Navan,
Co Meath.
Sir, – In relation to Chris Horn’s article about the viability of AI (“AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality, and its true business impact has yet to be proven”, Business, November 14th), I was recently asked by a PhD student where she could find my book “Gothic Perspectives on Lawrence Durrell”.
As I have never written a book on this subject (I wish I had!) I asked the student where she had found a reference to this title. She told me ChatGPT.
Quite apart from the shocking fact that a PhD candidate could use such a banal facility as an academic resource, one has to question the ethical status of an artificial intelligence which can make statements that are totally untrue.
It seems more like artificial stupidity.
The current emphasis on the significance of AI ignores the fact that, as long ago as 1949, Alan Turing not only predicted that a computer could write a sonnet, but also questioned the “Promethean irreverence” of such a prediction. – Yours, etc,
RICHARD PINE,
Perithia,
Corfu,
Greece.