GETTING STARTED WITH FREE AI FOR TEXTS
©2024 Donald R. Snow - Page last updated 2024-02-09
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ABSTRACT: AI (Artificial Intelligence) is helpful in many ways,
including in family history. Once you get started it is easy to use.
This presentation will help you get started with some of the major free
AI websites and how to use them for texts. Examples will illustrate this and give
you ideas to use it. The notes have the links, so if you use them
online, you can just click and go to the AI website. The AI websites we
will discuss are Microsoft's Copilot, Googles' Bard, Open AI's ChatGPT,
and Summarize.tech a website that will give you a text summary of any
closed-captioned YouTube video. The notes
and other related information, all with active internet
links, will be on the handout and posted on
https://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html .
WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION
- Instructor is Donald R. Snow ( snowd@math.byu.edu
) of Provo, Utah.
- The notes with active URLs and
additional information in other notes and articles are posted at
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html .
- Tips: (1) To put an icon on your
desktop for these notes, or any webpage, just
drag the icon from in front of the address (above) in
your browser onto your desktop.
(2) To open a link, but keep your place
in these notes, hold down the Control key
while clicking the link.
- Problem to discuss: What is AI, what are some of the free AI websites, and how do you use them for texts? (We will not discuss images and videos here.)
ABOUT AI
- AI has been around for many years,
but wasn't called that until Fall
of 2021; for example, Apple's
Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's
Google Assistant, are all AI.
- AI is a misnomer since it is not artificial and not intelligent -- it is just computer assisted searching.
- AI for texts is based on language and searches
1000s of posted documents for words near the search
terms you enter,
since those may be related to the
topic. Hence, it can never
"think ahead" beyond what has already been posted
online somewhere.
- AI programs are sometimes referred to as "large
language models", since they depend on
large collections of online data.
- To use an AI website, you usually have to
set up an account (free), but you may already have an account, e.g. if you use Gmail, you already have a Google account.
- Some of AI's strong points are that it may
help you find things you
didn't know or have forgotten and will help you
organize the information.
- Many helpful articles about AI are online and once
you get to an AI website, you can ask "how do I use
[AI website]?"
- Here is the link to a
Wikipedia article on AI -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence .
SOME FREE AI WEBSITES
- Microsoft's Copilot -- https://copilot.microsoft.com/ ; form a bookmark by dragging the icon from in front of the address to your bookmarks bar or to your desktop (see Item 3 above in these notes); type your query into the box at bottom labelled "Ask Me Anything" and click the icon at end of that line (Submit).
- Google's Bard -- https://bard.google.com/chat -- If you have a Gmail address, you already have a Google account and can use Bard.
- Open AI's ChatGPT -- https://chat.openai.com/ -- ChatGPT means "Chat Generative
Pre-Trained Transformer" (Now you know!) and Microsoft owns a large part of Open AI -- type in your query where it says "Message" and click the up-arrow at the right end (Submit) -- version 3.5 is free, and is from Jan 2022 -- later versions are commercial, i.e. you have to subscribe and pay to use them.
- Summarize It --https://www.summarize.tech
-- this is free and uses AI to generate a text summary of any closed-captioned YouTube video.
- There are many other free AI websites; to find others, when in any
one, type "list the top 5 free AI websites" .
- You need to check the results before
accepting them.
CAUTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
- AI can be used for bad purposes, just
like any technology.
- You can accept or ignore any of the results,
since it tells you where it got that
information; you need to check the results
for yourself.
- Since it uses online data, be careful of
what you put online so AI can't pick it up. You never know where
it may end up; for example, don't post personal
information online.
- In using AI be specific in what you ask for and,
when you see the results, restate your query so the results are closer to what you want.
- Try your query in more than one AI website, since you may get different results.
- You may find it helpful to copy and paste the text results into a file so you can edit them more easily and decide what to keep and what to ignore.
EXAMPLES OF USING AI
- "how do I get started and use copilot?"
- "find information in newspapers in Utah about "[Your Name]"
- "create a list of websites with death records for Louisiana"
- "find information about ... in ......."
- "find articles about [someone - put the name in quotes] in newspapers in [city and state]"
- "find an obituary of [person] from [location]"
- "How can I get a copy of my father's military service record?"
- "Create an outline of the history of Portugal."
- "Where are Congregational Church records for Massachusetts in the 1600s?"
CONCLUSIONS
- Once you get started using AI, it is easy to work with.
- After you get the first results, "sharpen" your query to get closer to what you want.
- We have only considered free AI websites for text in this class, not images nor videos.
- The free AI websites may be enough to
help with your questions, but you may get better results from the commercial ones.
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