WK13: Artificial Intellegence and It’s Uses in Society

Artificial Intelligence is an important application to society, it’s been around for decades and has helped improve almost every field.

Artificial Intelligence, commonly shortened to A.I., is a series of complex algorithms that collects and manages large sets of data that they review and execute to fulfill tasks assigned to it. A.I. is not a singular system or program, it is a large network that draws from multiple sources to construct human-like intelligence, this is called “Deep Learning” and is a key component of how to make an A.I.

You can’t quite pin who ‘made’ A.I., but you can cite who pioneered the technology, one, Alan Turning, who in 1950, published a work titled “Computer Machinery and Intelligence”, Turning coined the term “Artificial Intelligence, made “The Turing Test” and created the Turning Machine, he was fascinated with testing the limits of a computers intelligence and what it could do. Turning’s interest in computer intelligence became a widespread phenomenon, with many starting to use the term “Artificial Intelligence” and trying to conduct research on their own dedicated to finding the limits of computer intelligence.

Multiple programs, softwares and research companies were formed over the next few decades dedicated to Artificial Intelligence and trying to improve and build on it, industrial robots were designed, computers got programmed dedicated to storing and collecting data and later A.I. designed to play games, draw or even clean came out. In recent years, ChatGPT, a service created by OpenAI, an A.I. a research company that can generate responses, solve problems and talk to you all for free on their website, has come around and reignited interest in A.I. and artificial learning technology, spawning many other competitor websites and companies.

A.I. usually is trying to solve menial or tedious tasks for its users, like collecting data, taking away dangerous jobs from humans or speeding up jobs so they can get done faster. A.I. can be easily trained with the gathered information that you feed it, it never gets tired, will always cooperate and can generate content or complete a job so much faster than a human can, but with all of these upsides and amazing innovations comes a few major downsides. A.I., is a function that has undoubtedly helped us throughout its long life, but in recent years it’s been misused for less favorable purposes. A.I. as a tool has been used for the creation of A.I. “art”, this may seem harmless, as before A.I. has been used to draw or to create images, but the difference this time around is that the A.I. is being fed other real artists art to create sloppy, messy and overall bad art that is then being passed off as real genuine art. A.I. has to be feed information to work, this is standard, problems start to arise when you take information from an unwilling participant, a number of artists in the past few years have spoken out against this movement of A.I art, as it undermines the entire point of artists creation, having a machine spit out content at a fast rate based off the actual hard work of other artists is backwards, this has only become widespread, with companies using A.I. art for their shows and movies, games using A.I. voices, or people taking the voices of celebrities to make them sing A.I. songs, this widespread adoption of A.I. doing everything for you might take away creative jobs. This is a real danger towards creative genres, A.I. should only be used to help assist artists and creatives, not completely take over their work.

 

 

 

 

“Artificial Intelligence (AI): What it is and why it matters.” SAS, https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/what-is-artificial-intelligence.html. Accessed 24 November 2023.

Week 9: Understanding Social Media Demographics

1. What were the top three social media sites, in terms of traffic, in 22-23? List them in order of popularity.

The Top Three Social Media sites in 2022 stay the same for 2023, they are, Facebook, with 2.9 billion monthly users in 2022 and 3 billion as of now, YouTube with around 2.4-2.5 billion monthly users and WhatsApp with 2 billion in 2022 and 2023.

2. Provide a brief summary of how each social media site works and why people use it.

All three of the top visited sites let you connect with other people very easily. Facebook is built for you to connect with family and friends, sharing posts, videos and generally things about your life that your loved one would be interested in. YouTube is specifically built to house video entertainment, its main user base is there watch a multitude of different media provided to them by creators on the platform. Whatsapp is a service designed for people to send and receive text messages, it’s a wide expanding app being on basically every device you can think of, so it’s very useful for people trying to easily connect and chat with others.

3. What are “demographics” and why is it important in social media?

“Demographics” are specific groups of people that have a common attribute connecting them to others in that group. Demographics are important in social media because it helps companies understand what their users what to see on their platform

4. Explain any demographics that stand out among the three social media sites you listed above. (More popular with a specific age group, are majority of users male or female, married or single, employees or self-employed, etc.)

On Facebook, the largest age demographic is people aged 25-34, surprising seeing as how Facebook is known for its large elderly user base. For Youtube, people in India actually make up the majority of watchers on YouTube. On Whatsapp, its almost a clean ratio of 50/50 between men and women.

5. On average, how much time do users spend on each social media site during a day, week or month? Provide a resource that supports your answer.

For the monthly figures, Facebook users come in at around 20 hours per month on average

Youtube has around 23-24 hours per month on average and WhatsApp has around 17 hours per month on average

6. Which of the three social media networks is growing the fastest? Why do you think that is?

I think out of the top 3, there all very much past there prime, but i think that WhatsApp is the one still growing out of any of the options. WhatsApp is still relevant and usable by anyone while Facebook and Youtube lack any real relevancy to anyone who doesn’t already use them

7. How are the majority of visitors accessing these three sites (computer, mobile device, tablet)?

In terms of traffic to the websites, mobile devices have a staggering lead for all 3 top visited sites, For Facebook, a large 98.5% of people use Facebook through its mobile app as opposed to the desktop version, with 81.8% of people using only a mobile phone. YouTube has 72 billion users coming from mobile devices, while only getting around 8 billion on desktop. While no specific number was found, WhatsApp is undisputedly the number 1 mobile texting app ever with barely anyone using it on desktop.

 

sources:

Lua, Alfred. “21 Top Social Media Sites to Consider for Your Brand -.” Buffer, 5 October 2023, https://buffer.com/library/social-media-sites/. Accessed 2 November 2023.

Beer, Katharine. “Demographics: How to Collect, Analyze, and Use Demographic Data.” Investopedia, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/demographics.asp. Accessed 2 November 2023.

Dixon, Stacy Jo. “Facebook users reach by device 2022.” Statista, 24 February 2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/377808/distribution-of-facebook-users-by-device/. Accessed 2 November 2023.

Week 7 Midterm- Preventing Hacks and Digital Threats

Know Your Enemy and Know Yourself

I am a business owner with a moderately sized gourmet food chain with three stores. My stores make $1 million sales in goods every year, though the online side of my business is what I’m concerned about, as it is at the moment susceptible to online cyber attacks, there are a few ways to manage and solve the issues at hand though. Before we even begin solving the issue we must identify how the site would run into any issues, be it threats from an outside party or internal issues with programming. A common type of digital threat that plagues sites is financial fraud, it’s a broad title covering a lot of different techniques, but a frequent one involves someone like a hacker gaining access to my customers information and making false transactions under their name or just straight up selling their info to buy it (American Express).

A more specific type of financial fraud scam is called phishing, in which a malicious party pretends to be us and converses with one of our customers in order to obtain data. Phishing scams are usually done through email, they might send a fake email to an innocent customer to tell them about a delivery order or to ask for their password to reset their account, and the victim would be none the wiser (American Express). In the larger internet as a whole, but e-commerce specifically, bots are a big issue, on websites tailored around food or goods, someone can flood products with bots to acquire large sums of good to be scalped later on, or review bomb listings, in where they give 1 or 2 star reviews with fake accounts to drive down engagement (American Express). The most basic but effective tactic in getting information is simply using malware to scrape sites of data, a hacker may implant devious code into the system, getting it to try and find as much data as it can off of our servers (American Express).

A very devious and common type of attack that trumps all of these though are man-in-the-middle-attacks, attacks in where a hacker will ‘listen in’ on convos we have with our customers usually by intercepting them on their public wifi connections, this can easily let the hacker gain access to basically all of your private info like credit cards, passwords, browsing history and purchases made (American Express).

 

Develop Your Strategy

All of the attacks listed sound scary, and while they are effective, I have ways of controlling or outright eliminating the problem altogether with some very simple solutions. For any data breach issues that involve impersonation we can handle it with hard to crack verification systems like Multi-Factor Authentication or comparing the billing card being used to the card you have on file for specific users (Forbes). Any issue involving the transaction of money can be solved through off-loading the payment methods onto a third party such as PayPal, this model is less likely to get any fraudsters to take advantage of it like an in site transaction service would. (Forbes)

A highly effective strategy is having a complex security system, which makes sure that it would be hard for any hackers to even attempt to get any data off of your users or website. An SSL certificate on your website is one of the most effective ways of preventing fraud or hackings, it encrypts data on the website ensuring that our customers info stays hidden when it’s transferred and when it’s just in our systems, preventing regular financial fraud and man-in-the-middle attacks (Forbes). While all of our techniques are hard to crack, human error is still a factor in our business, but this might be the simplest solution, simply making sure our customers and our tech experts are knowledgeable on these types of threats is enough to prevent human error from happening but in the event of a slip-up the ultimate fail safe is encryption of data, so even if a malicious fraudster has our data in their hands they want be able to crack it due to the hardwired encoding in all of our customers data (Robinson).

 

American Express. “E-Commerce Security Threats and Their Solutions.” American Express, 19 December 2022, https://www.americanexpress.com/en-ca/business/trends-and-insights/articles/ecommerce-security-threats-and-their-solutions/. Accessed 11 October 2023.

 

Forbes. “’;;.’” ‘;;’ – YouTube, 9 March 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2022/03/17/nine-essential-security-steps-to-keep-your-e-commerce-customers-safe/?sh=3ddcc7f71cc7. Accessed 11 October 2023.

 

Robinson, Rick M. “Fail-Safe Security: Protecting Data From Cloud and Third-Party Risks With Encryption.” Security Intelligence, 11 October 2017, https://securityintelligence.com/fail-safe-security-protecting-data-from-cloud-and-third-party-risks-with-encryption/. Accessed 11 October 2023.

Introduction Post

Hi, I was able to log into the site using the cotc.edu link so I’m remaking my posts and website. I’m Izaiah Jones, I’m 17 and a senior in highschool, I have an interest in Art and Graphic Design, so I’m taking Digital Media Design to further my knowledge and skills in the medium. After highschool I’m hoping to go into college and major in Art/Animation. In my free time I usually draw on my laptop, play video games, like Street Fighter 6, Guilty Gear Strive, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry or try to cook, I really enjoy listening to music too, my favorite genres include rock, punk, alt rock, rap, hip hop, shoegaze, etc. I was even in band for a few years before quitting this year, I played the trombone. I’m excited to be taking this class this semester !