AI. In agriculture that can either refer to artificial insemination for breeding or, in this case, artificial intelligence. Everywhere you look nowadays, AI is all around us.

The first time I heard about some form of AI, I was watching the movie “I Robot,” starring Will Smith. If you haven’t seen the movie, essentially a rogue AI robot went on a spree of violence, and chaos ensues in a true action-style movie. So from that, AI seemed a scary, uncontrollable thing that needed to be watched carefully.

Flash-forward a decade (at least), and AI is a part of our everyday lives in more ways than you might think. On social media, you might have noticed your timeline for your page, or discover a page filled with things that interest you. That’s AI.

Something that I use often is Spotify, and its new DJ X feature is an AI-generated tool that pulls music and podcasts that are similar to your past listening habits. Because of this, I’ve come across a lot of new artists and shows I enjoy — all because of AI.

And then there are writing tools I can use to discover different key words, write better headlines or get a summary of interviews I conduct. While I believe that the best journalism comes from a real person, it can make life easier for a lot of different fields.

The good, the bad, the ugly

In discussing AI, I’m focusing on generative AI alone. We could really get bogged down in the weeds if we started popping around to the other types of AI, so let’s start on an easier note.

Some positives of AI follow:

But there are negatives involved with AI too, such as:

In assessing all of this information, even if you can use AI, should you?

From the looks of it, AI is here to stay. No matter what you think about using it in a professional or personal level, it’s integrating into our daily lives — at least online.

For farmers and ranchers, generative AI can have the biggest impact in market predictions and in precision agriculture applications. But what do you think? Are you a fan of the AI tools we use in our online lives? Are you decidedly against AI influence? Or are you curious yet undecided?

Let me know your thoughts at [email protected].