My
first brush with AI was in my final year at Uni. The cool kids had
snatched all of the interesting thesis topics. My friend Paul was
capturing 3D data from a 2D image, similar to this
- very cool. I approached one of my computer science lecturers and he
said, “read this, and base your thesis on it”. The book was Vehicles by Valenteno Braitenberg - an exploration into a form of AI called synthetic psychology that started my fascination in AI and, in particular, neural networks.
Fast forward to just over a week ago (November 30 to be exact). ChatGPT was
released by OpenAI for public research, and uses neural networks and
language models to give a deeply engaging experience. It can create
content - like “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.”
It can answer follow up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge
incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. But most
importantly for us IT geniuses, ChatGPT can create executable code from a
simple natural language command.
We are using it now to write PowerShell
configuration scripts to push out to Surface Pros via Endpoint Manager.
It provides a good starting point for the script, inserts intelligible
comments, and explains the code for you. I can see many other uses.
Can’t
remember how to write an SQL query to unload the first 1000 rows from a
table? Ask ChatGPT and you’ll have syntactically correct code that’s
ready to execute in seconds. Have code that is throwing an error? Give
it to ChatGPT and it will give possible ways to fix it. Can’t remember
how to write a particular function expression in Power Automate?
Again, ChatGPT is surprisingly good in giving a ready to run answer. It
can even pretend to be a Linux box.
The gap between people and machines is closing.
If you remember seeing Dark Star in
the 70s or 80s, you’ll remember the conversations between crew and
computers - coaxing bombs back into the ship after the bombs decided
they needed to deploy. I guess you had to be there. Anyhow, the point
I am trying to make is that AI is useful and fallible all at the same
time. Use it wisely!
Across the Industry
Victorian Government moves to centralise more services in a digital hub
Losing track of open tabs in your web browser? Download the OneTab browser extension to convert tabs into a restorable list
Listen to Professor Jon Whittle discuss ethics in software development on the AI Australia podcast
The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) and the Actuaries Institute release guidelines to create safeguards against Artificial Intelligence (AI) discrimination
Attend a free webinar on zero trust strategies for cloud access
Recent Government Tenders
City of Stonnington: Data, Reporting, and Integration Services Panel (VendorPanel)
Lismore City Council: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Operations (SOC) V2 (VendorPanel)
Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning: Resource Management System (VendorPanel)
Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning: Student Management System (for Forest Fire Management) (VendorPanel)
WorkSafe Victoria: Hospital Data Collection, Analytics, Reporting and Value-based Healthcare Benchmarking (VendorPanel)
City of Hobart: SQL Database Administration Support Services (TenderLink)
Towong Shire Council: Destination Website Build (Tenders.Net)
Towong Shire Council: Destination Website Content Development (Tenders.Net)
Towong Shire Council: Digitisation of Records (Tenders.Net)
Indigo Shire Council: Project Pinnacle (IT Project Management) (eProcure)
Microsoft News
Gippsland Health Alliance (GHA) shifts to the Microsoft Azure cloud for greater efficiency and lower costs
Microsoft Search now displays Outlook attachments you have access to
