10 Positive Impacts of Artificial Intelligence

Although artificial intelligence seems like something we've been hearing about all of a sudden, it didn't just appear out of nowhere: Scientists have been working on creating practical AI models for years, and only recently have they been able to create something that's actually useful.

At first glance, it may seem like AI is only good for language processing or image processing. You can have AI write stories or create images. Some creators have even used AI to create entire books. Or, if you've been following AI developments for a while, you may have heard stories of AI going off the rails.

Despite the widespread doom and gloom, AI isn't necessarily bad. Quite the opposite. In fact, you're already using AI in a variety of ways, even if you don't realize it. Here are the 10 best ways to use AI in your daily life.

Digital Assistants and Smart Home Devices

If you own an Amazon Alexa device, an Apple product with Siri, or an Android-based device with Google Assistant, then you're already using AI on a daily basis, even if you don't realize it.

Digital assistants are software applications that can learn the user's voice, recognize speech patterns, and even monitor the surrounding environment to send alerts when the sound of glass breaking or other triggers occur. Statistics show that more than 40 percent of people use these digital assistants in some form or another.

Digital assistants use natural language processing, which is the ability to recognise commonly used words and phrases and “guess” what response you want based on those words and phrases.

What's more, it can also be programmed to perform complex routines, like dimming the lights, changing the temperature, or reading out specific information, when you enter the right phrase.

Streaming Services

About 80% of people around the world listen to music through some kind of streaming service. That's a lot of music streaming. And AI is coming in there.

For example, Spotify has an AI-enhanced streaming service in beta testing that creates playlists based on the music you listen to and explains why it picked the songs for that playlist.

If you use Netflix or Amazon Prime, you may have used AI before. Both services have AI-enhanced features that help them recommend things for you to watch. Netflix has even tried using AI to create animated movies.

Creative Work

If you work (or play) in a creative environment and use software applications like Adobe After Effects or Premiere Pro, you may have used AI there. Aimed specifically at video creators, the company has added AI features to assist creators during the editing process.

But it's not just digital creators who can benefit from AI: Programs like Magic Canvas for Glowforge laser cutters incorporate AI to help creators move their ideas from concept to creation.

Even woodworkers are using AI to design woodworking projects in ways that weren't possible before.

Fitness Plan

Fitness is another area that has gained a lot of attention in recent years as more and more people realize the need for a healthier lifestyle. As a result, some are turning to AI to create fitness plans that are tailored to focus on their specific needs, style, and preferences.

Apps like FitnessAI have come online to help novice users gain a deeper understanding of AI capabilities and create truly customized workouts.

And that doesn't even take into account all the apps already available that use AI to guide people towards healthier lifestyle choices, nor does it include software built into wearable devices.

education

Researchers are working on ways to integrate AI into education at all levels. For example, researchers at Clemson University are developing an AI that can customize lesson plans based on students' needs, and researchers at Stanford University have prototyped an AI-enhanced biology textbook that helps students find the answers they need and engages them to deepen their understanding of the subject.

AI can go beyond basic instruction to improve students' language skills. Programs like Grammarly can learn a person's writing style and offer suggestions to improve their writing by targeting what they've outlined in their document. Grammarly can also help teachers by sniffing out plagiarism.

Work Project

Lately, there has been a focus on creating AI that helps people perform everyday tasks faster, and what better place to apply this kind of AI than to the necessary communications people have to create and send every day at work?

For example, if you’ve ever used Gmail and noticed that suggestions appear when you’re writing an email, that’s AI.

Microsoft has also entered the field with Copilot, an AI assistant that helps you create documents, presentations, and reports, composes email replies, monitors your calendar to sync meeting times, and even creates pivot tables in Excel.

Achieving accessibility

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of AI is its ability to help people with disabilities. For example, image generation AI, MidJourney's feature, automatically creates alt text for images. Alt text describes the image that screen readers use to help people with disabilities decipher the images on a page.

Another advancement that AI can facilitate is the diagnosis of disabilities. There was a time when people could reach adulthood before being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, or even Asperger's syndrome. Now, AI can look at behavioral patterns, test results, and other information to diagnose these and other conditions. Furthermore, once a diagnosis is made, AI can help create a care plan to help people learn how to function more effectively with their disability or overcome it altogether.

Combating climate change

Climate change is on nearly everyone's mind: changes in weather patterns, animal behavior, differences in the atmosphere, and even increases in disease can all be attributed to it, and AI can help address these issues.

For example, AI is helping to monitor climate change and suggest ways to reduce emissions. It also has the ability to uncover previously overlooked facts and data, allowing researchers to think more creatively about the problems facing the planet, which in turn allows scientists to find better solutions to the problems we face. AI may even help save honeybees, which are so important to our ecosystem.

Winning the War on Drugs

An unexpected benefit of AI, which can process billions of bits of data, is that it can make connections faster than humans can. Think of drug molecules that could be used to create new, more dangerous designer drugs. AI can connect the dots between those combinations, and scientists and law enforcement can use it to stop those drugs from being created.

Taking this idea a step further, AI could also use that information to create safer, more effective medicines to treat previously untreatable diseases.

Better healthcare

AI can be used to develop better medicines and improve healthcare to levels we have only dreamed of before. For example, AI can make connections in patient records to point out early symptoms of disease. Or, AI can be used to identify markers of disease in areas that are difficult to distinguish.

No matter how AI is used in healthcare, its ability to leverage vast amounts of data and create unprecedented connections opens up a world of potential treatments and preventative measures that could become a reality in the near future.

Why artificial intelligence can contribute to the world

Putting all this together, it's easy to see the potential for artificial intelligence to have a positive impact on our world – and we haven't even mentioned chatbots, banking and finance, social media, or facial recognition yet.

Are there still many nuances that need to be considered, addressed, and possibly enacted into law? Absolutely. But we've only just scratched the surface of this technology, and the possibilities are endless. It will be exciting to see what happens next.