HAND IN HAND WITH AI

How will artificial intelligence change agriculture?

- Alex Gray

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the tech sector’s newest innovations and will likely impact every industry. Beyond just a buzzword, this technology may be on your farm soon.

Artificial intelligence is loosely defined and can mean anything from machine learning to large language model (LLM) generative AI. Machine learning is already used in agriculture, such as on John Deere’s See and Spray system, using cameras to identify weeds to spray and obstacles to avoid.

Chances are, you have already heard of generative AI, and can already use it on multiple different web platforms and devices — Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Facebook’s Meta AI all are available for consumer use. Generative AI can create a variety of text, images, and audio, and is in the very early stages of video generation.

There are many AI business- and consumergrade applications, including those for the agriculture industry. Before diving into AI’s potential benefits, it’s necessary to understand how it works, and its limitations.

HOW IT WORKS

As one of the first AI models to reach the market, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is at the forefront of this technology and is already integrated into many business’s day-today operations. Users can ask ChatGPT to write text, summarize and organize it, and even have a “conversation.”

ChatGPT and many other popular AI services run on LLM to generate text from a user’s input. It does this by “reading” existing text on the internet, and recognizes how words tend to appear in context with other words, sort of like a highly capable auto-complete function when typing on a smartphone. It uses this to predict the next most likely word that might appear in response to a request, and each word after that.