Proponents of artificial intelligence systems, including ChatGPT that recently became available to the public, say it is just the beginning of a sea change that will profoundly affect our lives.
They say few professions will remain unscathed by this new wave of technology — from farming to finance to law to medicine to coding to content creation, including journalism.
These new AI language models are part of natural language processing, a field of AI that enables computers to understand and generate human language.
This allows users to have conversations with chat bots that constantly improve through these interactions.
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My understanding is we are just scratching the surface on how AI-based language models will affect agriculture, and that the industry will benefit profoundly from them.
Farmers can be considered generalists because they need to be competent in many topics — from chemistry to mechanics to agronomy to marketing to counselling the grain cart operator.
These new chatbots excel at quickly summarizing topics with the relevant information available on the internet.
For instance, I’m looking for a new mower for the farmyard, so I told ChatGPT to list and summarize the zero turn mowers available in Western Canada that are suitable for a five-acre yard.
It did a decent job creating a list that matched the list of machines I already compiled, and it did this immediately, for free.
However, farmers need information far more specialized than lawnmowers.
Most of these language models are not trained with highly specific data that farmers require to help them pull through some of the tangles.
This will quickly change.
FBN already launched a chatbot called Norm on its website that’s built upon ChatGPT and trained with the company’s agronomy blog and product database, and other agricultural companies will soon follow suit.
But even with AI trained up for ag applications, your experience and the knowledge of your social and professional networks will remain the best guides you can get your hands on for the foreseeable future.
ChatGPT can compile a decent list of lawnmower options for you, but it never sat on or fixed any of them.
So, it seems ChatGPT has not rendered obsolete the opinions on your local coffee row.
