Vocab Term: Expert System
Definition: The expert system is brought about through machine learning. Tech companies like Open AI or Google have developed Language Learning Models that can mimic certain aspects of the human brain. By scanning vast amounts of online data through machine learning an expert system involving AI has emerged. These AI programs are able to not only able to devise a navigation path toward a “goal state,” which is an architecture system, but they’re able to combine facts and reason about many different subjects.
DH Source: These two definitions; architecture and expert systems were described by David Elson. To arrive at an expert system machine learning first had to come into existence.
“Machine learning approaches can attempt to mimic the structure of the human brain (neural networks) or use mathematical techniques to classify input into one of a set of predetermined categories, such as distinguishing fact from opinion in news text” (Elson 21).
Without Machine Learning Large Language Models (LLM) would have never been created for the purposes of AI programs.
“Unspervised learning techniques do not even require a predetermined set of categories, instead building their own models of the world; these systems discover patterns that emerge from large quantities of data in a bottom-up fashion, such as discovering the syntax of a language be recognizing that certain words tend to occur in certain sequences” (Elson 21).
Commentary: AI is a revolutionary technology. Without the hardware that makes AI possible, such as the GPU processors that NVIDIA sells, AI wouldn’t currently exist. Unfortunately, AI is disrupting aspects of the creative or content driven economy. Tech companies have applied machine learning to nearly everything that anyone has ever written. The drawback to this involves the potentiality of machines being able to create content. In the future machines might mimic the minds of various authors. Corporations would no longer have to pay content creators. The “creative economy” in the U.S. represents a workforce of nearly 5.1 million, and damage that AI could do for many writers, authors, and content creators might never be recoverable.
David Elson. “Artificial Intelligence” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.