AI Prompt Engineering Trial 2

 

Community Engagement 1,... 20, 21, 22 & 23

Updates: Medium prof channel reflects this here.

My post here, starting my experiment to convert my CIC (non profit) from Cottenham.info to Cottenham.ai, showed how can we use AI (Wikipedia) for good. My CIC started to address rural isolation in East Anglia in light of climate change and the pandemic (here and here). After a COVID hiatus forced this reassessment, the advent of AI piqued our interest beyond the hype in the press - see my companion Medium series on this topic, following four posts from The future is digital… only it’s not what you think! here - this lead into a curious interaction and my partner finding a new direction.

Pitch&Mix Meetup

This group (here) asked if "AI should be used to create marketing materials?" The kick-off was that materials had been scraped (see follow-on post) and put together forever it seems, and AI only accelerates or facilitates it… as long as we admit to it transparently, and use it to improve our own research rather than replace it!

An interesting anecdote emerged there: everyone knows how IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer AI beat chess champion Kasparov in 1996 & 1997 rematch (Wikipedia)… but no-one knows that the following day, Kasparov and Deep Blue together beat Deep Blue every time! It also emerged that we could not find anything on that on-line, so thorough was IBM's supression of that event.

Let me relate a personal experience: My daughter year-end report was about Hungarian folklore, and she asked me to translate it into Hungarian to add "couleur locale". I said, "No, it wouldn't be her work". I hit on this idea, however: I asked her to put it thru Google Translate, and I would do minor edits; that way, she did it, and I only assisted. Bingo! She was a happy camper… A simplistic case of hidden AI as discussed above, augmenting not replacing a task, and collaboratively to boot.

Footnote: Interestingly, this Cambridge Union debate occurred not 12 hrs. after the meetup: This House Believes Artificial Intelligence Is An Existential Threat (YouTube).

New direction

My CIC partner through his contacts started to engage local community health services. As he and I were working on a prospectus for this, we used both Bing AI (here) and Google Bard (here) to bird-dog NHS England services and information, in particular in the area of social prescribing. I struck us that while prompt engineering was indeed important to properly pose the questions (see blog posts here and here), we were in fact the prompt engineers! Like the Deep Blue story above, it's humans + AI that work rather than AI per se.

So to echo Mark Twain, "the reports of [human intelligence's] death [vs. AI] are greatly exaggerated".