Businesslink

Artificial intelligence has vast potential in agriculture.

It's already being used to drive tractors, identify weeds in the field and predict the next few lines of the text message you're about to send to your marketing adviser.

A wave of technology built on artificial intelligence tools is coming, and it's a farmer's choice whether to adopt these technologies in their business. Regardless of what you choose, you'll have to interact with it.

One of the tools you may be seeing more of soon is advanced chatbots, built on software like ChatGPT. It's a kind of artificial intelligence called a large language model using machine-learning algorithms to process and generate text that appears like it was written by a human being.

Like most new technologies, the current version has limitations. It's only as good as the information it accesses. A good query gets a good response, and that's sometimes trickier than it seems. It can't make decisions for you.

"The context matters in agriculture," says University of Delaware postdoctoral researcher Eugene Law. Extension agents, for example, take a farmer's location, practices and history into account when making a recommendation. ChatGPT doesn't have access to that information. Without the right context, its use as an advisory tool is limited.

John Shutske, a University of Wisconsin professor and Extension safety specialist, agrees. "At this stage and in the foreseeable future, I don't believe that these AI models will really have the ability to reliably tease out the 'right questions' that a person (or business or community) really should be asking."

That doesn't mean it will always be that way. Look at the internet. Adoption was slow and limited in the 1990s, became mainstream in the 2000s and is now integrated into our lives. Perhaps someday, large language models will become one of the tools that makes your business better.

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