Tag: AI

Wi-Fi — AI knows best? Not here!

Mike1 Comment

During a recent firmware upgrade to my Vodafone Broadband Fibre Router, changes were made to allow for the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to select the ‘best’ Wi-Fi channel to use. All well and good, you might say, but what about if the AI channel selected suddenly causes issues?

There must be a way of manually selecting another Wi-Fi Channel to overcome any issues. Well there was, that is until the same firmware upgrade also took away the ability to for the end-user to manually change to another Wi-Fi channel!

Currently, my Vodafone Broadband Fibre Router’s AI has selected Wi-Fi channel 11 as the best to use.

I have used a Wahoo Bike Computer for a number of years, which has worked fine with my previous ISP—BT’s Broadband Router and with the new Vodafone Broadband Fibre Router’s prior to the AI upgrade.

It turns out that the Wahoo Bike Computer is a USA developed product and only works with Wi-Fi channels 1–9! So how am I supposed to connect now for syncing and updates if I can’t set my Vodafone Broadband Fibre Router to another Wi-Fi channel?

I spoke to both Wahoo and Vodafone support, here are no plans at Wahoo to change their 1-9 Wi-Fi channel ability. At Vodafone, there seems no clear understanding of what impact this ‘AI’ implementation has caused me, one suggestion was that I should move my ‘device’ closer to the router! They did suggest that I do a full reboot of the router, which I did and now the router is using channel 13! Still no good to me.

In the meantime, I am using my neighbours (with their permission) to sync my Wahoo Bike Computer, they (the neighbours) use a different ISP using Wi-Fi Channel 6, it connects with no issues from over 5 meters away.

Watch this space!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Good or Bad?

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AI has been very much in the news recently and its use (or potential use) seems to be increasing at breakneck speed.

There are plenty of serious discussion points about the subject on the web. However, with any newly emerging technology, many are based around how much money can be made from AI.

One such example is the announcement by Open AI, the people that bought us ChatGPT are now looking to raise an eye watering investment capital of $30 billion ! I personally don’t think they will have any trouble finding that as the world scurries along the AI discovery path.

That said, there are numerous voices that have raised concerns about many aspects of AI, such as the ethics behind its use. Let’s ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help understand more by asking it to write something about AI and ethics.

Example of interaction with ChatGPT – About 2 seconds for the response to appear!

Could I have written a better opening? This leads on to writing in general, with this AI capability how will we know who (or what) has written the text that we are reading or whose opinions we are being subjected to. We are constantly having discussion about how much Social Media influences our live. How much will AI influence them. Here’s another interaction with ChatGPT, this time about Cyclists and Car drivers.

Example of interaction with ChatGPT – About 15 seconds for the response to appear!

Was this something I could have read in a newspaper/magazine/book? How good was its writing, did it copy something from the internet or was it truly a unique piece of work created by an AI.

Out of interest, I used a number of tools to check spelling, grammar, reuse and finally loaded it is to Word 365. Using Word’s latest spellchecker, apart from one small conciseness error, it reported it could not find any similar written piece on the Web.

Only one error found, but no copies found online!

This brings us on to another aspect of the use of AI that have many of those in education seriously worried. How will they be able to judge Students contributions when hand in their work and this is not something new!

The conversation has a long way to go, I think.

I was looking at some other aspects of AI and came across a number of newly released AI’s that can generate Art on request! One I that I looked at with amazement was DALL·E2, which is another AI from OpenAI’s stable of AI tools. This and similar AI’s raise a whole series of questions around Copyright.

Who owns the copyright for AI generated images? The original artist, the AI, the person who commissioned the artwork, i.e. the person using the AI? It seems to be a bit of a minefield! Here’s a few articles on that subject.

Here’s some of the art that I had DALL·E2 generate for me from a simple one line description.

Time to generation, 3 seconds!
Time to generation, 3 seconds!
Time to generation, 3 seconds!

It’s one of those sites you could really spend time on, I did for a while!! But it is amazing what can be achieved with a few simple instructions. Art creation may never be the same again!

That said, Ai is here to stay and is already in use in a number of areas that you may not have released that you probably touch on a daily basis.

There will be many benefits (and drawbacks) from the use of AI in our lives. However, it is absolutely right that we need to question the advances and make sure that we control the AI’s before they have the ability to control us!