Opinion: Why get ‘interested’ in artificial intelligence

It was exciting to be invited to the annual conference of Project Voice, which took place last month at the Edney Innovation Center in downtown Chattanooga, also home to the country’s fastest internet since 2016.

Project Voice looks at artificial intelligence — but not the traditional AI that analyzes historical data and makes future numeric predictions. Rather, the focus is on conversational and generative AI, terms I hadn’t heard until listening and learning at the conference. Conversational AI can hold two-way interactions with humans by understanding and responding in text or speech. Generative AI can take prompts and create all kinds of new content but is indistinguishable from human-generated content. I started to feel overwhelmed by this new information.

But then I learned that I’m actually a consumer of conversational AI, also called “natural language-based artificial intelligence,” such as I when return products on a website.