Today, AI has become a household technology tool used for day-to-day activities. This development came together thanks to Open AI’s wonderful and easy-to-use ChatGPT. Its advent has propelled research projects decades into the future. While there have been several mainstream use cases, some surprising cases have also popped up. These unusual, out-of-the-box AI applications are being developed globally across every industry.
Some may call them groundbreaking, while others may call them quirky. Here are 8 of the weirdest AI innovations happening today around the world.
1. AI Artists: Algorithms creating masterpieces
Beyond chatting with an AI bot, several large AI players, including Open AI, Google, Apple, and other tech companies, have now developed tools to generate images from text. Furthermore, they come with multiple images, allowing one to choose the best. This feature has become extremely famous, so much so that several auction houses are also selling these AI-generated images for millions of dollars. AI systems like DALL-E and DeepArt are creating masterpieces that would put several budding artists into a frenzy.
But this begs the question, is AI-generated art truly “creative”? The reason this question arises is that every image generated has been trained on millions of other images that are owned by other artists. However, none of such artists are ever given credit. There are even instances where AI-generated images can come across as inappropriate or even racist. This can occur if the images used to train the AI model in itself were innately biased, which one one of the ethical questions we discussed here.
2. Robot Lawyers: AI in the courtroom
Today, AI has been adopted in scenarios and roles that involve a lot of monotonous tasks. An interesting sector where AI has slithered its way into is the law. There is a large amount of legal jargon that most common people cannot and will not understand. Unless you’re a lawyer by profession, it becomes very difficult for you to navigate the plethora of rules, regulations, exceptions, and loopholes within terms and conditions, much less ensure the work is thorough. This is where AI as a lawyer or someone providing legal services comes into play. These days, tools like DoNotPay offer said legal assistance.
This is a clear example of a case where AI has the power to revolutionize and disrupt the legal profession, not only empowering common people to consume legal paperwork but also empowering lawyers to efficiently analyze large volumes of documents quickly and make them more efficient.
3. AI Sommelier: Wine Recommendations by Algorithms
Another interesting industry ripe for AI disruption is the wine industry. As unbelievable as it sounds, AI combines advanced algorithms with personalized taste profiling to present the best wine recommendations. Several platforms can now analyze your DNA and/or taste preferences to suggest wines tailored to your palate. These AI models have also become so creative that they can now evaluate flavor notes, and food pairings, and even predict which vintage wine type you’ll love most!
Beyond suggesting the best wine blend for you, an AI sommelier can also mix blends as per your taste to create unique and personalized blends. Furthermore, these digital sommeliers are enhancing wine discovery for enthusiasts. It can even optimize production strategies in vineyards to help people indulge in better richer experiences. AI is elevating the art of wine selection to unprecedented levels.
4. AI-powered dating coaches
The world of dating can be daunting for a majority of people. As a consumer of dating apps, you can face the challenge of something as simple as having to start conversations or display your personality traits to a person of interest. Such approaches can be highly subjective and depend from situation to situation. AI bots can now be your personal dating coach and help you with conversational support when connecting with the other person. By providing tools like reply suggestions and text initiation ideas, these tools can play a significant role in converting your efforts into meaningful relationships.
5. Al for Wildlife Conservation: Monitoring and Protecting Species
Aminal endangerment is a huge problem driven by both natural factors like global warming and human factors like poaching. Most importantly, it can be hard to keep track of these endangered animals and identify which species are on the verge of extinction. Efforts such as the Elephant Listening Project have come up with AI models to detect poachers and help prevent the unwarranted killing of elephants.
Such efforts can create strides in advancing environmental activism. These AI models can help activists bring tangible evidence and proof to support their cause and leverage AI to identify poacher behavior unlike ever before, preventing possible future poaching. It can even help identify endangered species behavior and seasonal patterns which can help us learn a great deal about these animals as well.
6. Al-Created Recipes: Chefs of the Future
The kitchen is one of the last places you’d see an AI module. But somehow it has wavered its way into cuisines. Just as a wine sommelier, an AI chef can identify your tastes and suggest the best dish for you. Furthermore, depending on your preferences, it can even create completely new dishes for you that may have otherwise never existed. The possibilities are limitless. Al systems like IBM’s Chef Watson are creating unique recipes for this very purpose.
7. Al Music Producers: Tunes from Machines
AI models generating music must have been on everyone’s bingo cards. After creating an AI chatbot that can form sentences and talk back to you and an AI that can create images, the next sector that AI would penetrate was the music industry.
There are two types of AI-generated tunes. The first is completely AI-generated i.e. system designed without any reference or correlation to any one style. The second one is AI-generated music in collaboration with human artists. These AI algorithms can support production in several ways including suggesting complementary tunes that go with each other or fine-tuning current production pieces for improvement.
8. Al Mood Forecasters: Machines Reading Emotions
Your mood is a combination of internal hormonal balance, physical behavior, and external social stimuli. These triggers as data points, when carefully analyzed and fed into an AI model can help predict possible moods one may persist in certain scenarios. They can even gauge moods and emotions in real-time if individuals have any wearables that can accurately and consistently track these data points.
There can be several significant applications of such AI models in therapy and stress management. If used properly, such support from AI can help develop crucial ways to overcome emotional damage or even cope with mental disorders.
Deviating from main-stream AI applications
As you can see AI innovation is far and wide-reaching, with a wide range of applications in almost every industry and sector, no matter how unique or unexpected it may be. Some of these innovations are quite odd but at the same time serve some purpose or create some value.
How odd or unexpected do you think these applications are? Were they surprising to you? Let us know what other interesting applications are in the comments below.