AI rookie

[Underbudget]

Totally exposing my ignorance here but I've totally had my head in the sand around AI. It scares the bejeezus out of me tbh so have firmly been avoiding anything to do with it! It seems I need to be dragged kicking and screaming into dealing with it!

I know chatgpt etc can be really helpful for lots of things, but can anyone explain, in idiotproof terms, how it actually works?

Does it just scan everything there is on the Internet to come up with answers? Or does it have access to greater sources of info - thinking research papers etc.

If it just scans the Internet, surely with the amount of duff stuff that's out there it must surely skew the results?

I have occasionally used chat gpt to research things but have found that quite often the links aren't real and I've also read that it's programmed to please the prompter so will often give you a skewed answer. Plus I just read that MIT did a study on AI users recently and found that their neural connections collapsed by almost 50% along with other negative consequences so I think I'm going to avoid it as much as possible in the future!

I have just started using it at work
Outlook comes with CoPilot. I can stick a piece of writing in it and ask it to format it tidily for example.
Really helpful when someone sends you a list of names and email addresses, all badly formatted, some linked some not, some with random extra punctuation. ‘Format into a table with names and email addresses’. Bam.
‘tidy up this list of dates’.
Extract the email addresses from this do ument.

It’s better at specific measures, visibly assessable tasks.