The Rise of AI Assistance
Tags: technology, ai, assistance, development
Published: 2023-04-20 15:51:46

## **INITIAL ENCOUNTER**

During an all-hands on deck meeting at a former company, the execs shared with us their latest strategy and vision for the upcoming year. One of the major highlights revolved around the usage of artificial intelligence. AI generated artwork and believable articles that covered current events from the news were presented as samples. After the presentation, a discussion was held for the tech team and business team. Questions such as, "how should we integrate this into the app?", "where does the business stand with our end users demands when it comes to assistance?", and "how to validate legal documents with AI course corrections?". These were all valid questions. But how do we trust such a tool at such an early stage? 

## **PLAUSIBLE USAGE**

This lead me to have a discussion with an old friend of mine in regards to its validity. I shared code snippet examples with him as I experimented with the ChatGPT on my own for development purposes. What I discovered was that the answers it gave me provided a dopamine of confidence. It didn't ask it top give me a full blown answer to what I was developing, but it did nudge me in the right direction on what I was trying to solve. Just this past week, I decided to take a dive into ChatGPT as an alternative option debugging and solving coding challenges. I knew behind the scenes this was just a machine, but the confidence I felt and lack of nervousness to ask stupid questions 

There are plenty of options out there these days for developers to search online for help. Everything from Stackoverflow, Reddit, Discord and Slack channels. But the response from an actual human being may not be instantaneous. No one is ever going to be on-call to help you out immediately. Well, this is where the AI platforms work best. 

Back to the initial encounter I had with the former company, how will this transcend to an interaction with a typical end-user? This is a basic interactive question. Let's say this is a medical field and you have on-call nurses and doctors for you to speak with virtually. But what if the questions could be answered by an AI. I know you're probably thinking, "oh no, not one of those automated phone assistance systems!" Those in my opinion are pretty poor and I normally say, "representative" or "agent" almost immediately! There are tools out there that give that little bubble like chatbox on the bottom right corner of most sites nowadays, but how much of those are powered by an intelligent AI at this point?

## **CONCLUSION**

Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay. It will gradually evolve into something were it will be more widely accepted, dissolving the notion at AI's will grow into a sentient being and take over the world. Humans are still behind it's evolution and depending on how we interactive with it over time. The data it uses in order to answer our questions will expand deeper and deeper over time.

This was initially published on my site at jameslau.com (https://jameslau.com/the-rise-of-ai-assistance/). Please come by and check out more of my writing and other works!

Thanks for reading!