Time for an AI rewind

This is an interesting quote buried in a significantly less interesting article about AI being used to come up with ideas for TV shows:

"The BBC's Springwatch and Winterwatch use a bespoke AI system that monitors live camera feeds, and has been trained to recognise, record and log different species of animals and birds as they appear in the frame," he says. "It can then tell the production team how often they appear, give behavioural insights, and generally do something that would eat up hours of human production time."

The current focus on generative AI — Ai which creates based on its best guess of what it should say or draw next — has somewhat obscured the vital role that more specific, more targeted machine learning algorithms can play in many everyday tasks.

This particular example is fascinating because it frees up researchers from spending literally hours combing through footage before they can start the work of storytelling around it. And it also exposes new information it would have been too time intensive to collect otherwise. This isn’t about replacing people, but about taking away laborious work and freeing up their time to do more valuable creative work.

We’re letting the shiny new, but unreliable, AI tools distract us from the ones we know can work really well.