[Air-L] Discussion of ChatGPT and other AIs and their uses

[Peter Timusk]

Hello I haven't really posted to this list for a decade or more I think. I
work in statistical computing these days and rarely spend time on my
employer's ( Statistics Canada) Internet Use surveys though I did write one
short study in 2009.

At work we do a lot of statistical computing and even analysts are
expected to be able to calculate statistics for their own papers. We are
moving off the statistical computing language SAS and going open source
with R and Python. We are also expected to start exploring AI for use in
making things more efficient and saving money.but also to do so with high
ethical standards and of course working within our culture of citizen and
business data privacy.

I just wanted to write this email to see if there is any discussion
possible here via email.

I have used AI for the past few months to do some volunteer work. Here I am
making an online collection of PDFs into a searchable set of blog posts on
a Word Press site. I have learned that one can ask long search questions to
ChatGPT and it will produce code examples and workflows, say to show me how
to use R and the PDFTools an R package to extract text from these PDFs. I
generally have to know what I am looking for to ask the questions but
am happy so far with the results of this AI use. I also have to read the
code and understand the loops and logic going on which allows my
programming experience to validate the results.

I am about to use Python suggested by ChatGPT to make an offline archive of
all my Facebook posts from 2007 to now and also publish these in some neat
fashion to a WordPress blog.

anyways hoping to join the discussions on AI bias and ethics that have been
going on for awhile.