Rob

James O’Malley has written a fantastic piece on the results of a recent Transport for London (TfL) experiment in using AI to improve safety and the passenger experience at the Willesden Green London Underground station.

While the technology was initially implemented with an eye on detecting fare evasion, the experiment has thrown up a host of potential added use cases like the below:

• Track how crowds move through the station, which could be useful for managing capacity at rush hour or knowing where to deploy staff when there’s a football crowd passing through.
• If someone steps foot on to the tracks or into an unauthorised areas of the station, the staff can receive an immediate alert.
• If someone in a wheelchair passes through the station, they can be immediately flagged to staff, so that any assistance they need can be provided.
• Alert staff if a person is sat on a bench for longer than ten minutes or if they were in the ticket hall for longer than 15 minutes, as it implies they may be lost or require help.

This could be a powerful tool for collecting statistical data and giving management a high-level view of what’s happening at a station, which can lead to improvements in both security and passenger welfare.

It’s no secret that every forward-thinking organisation on the planet is scrambling around for use cases for Ai tools.

IKEA are traditionally quite tech-savvy and experimental when it comes to new tools, so it’s no surprise that they’ve been embracing Ai for a while. Now they’ve launched an “Ai assistant” on the GPT Store that gives you product-specific recommendations and visualisations based on your inputs.

It seems a bit clunky at the moment (what isn’t?), relying on sending users to articles and struggling with live product availability information, but it’s a nice idea all the same.

I’m sure at some stage you’ll be able to upload or take a pic of your living room and say “Show me what the KIVIK sofa looks like in my flat”.

There’s been a LOT of noise around Ai-generated content over the last twelve months with everyone and their uncle seemingly using Ai tools like ChatGPT to help them create content quicker and more easily.

And while a lot has been written about how to help people start using Ai content tools themselves, not a lot has covered about how the end user feels about all this, whether they like or dislike the idea of the content they are consuming being created by a bot.

Until now.

MIT Sloan student Yunhao Zhang and senior lecturer Renee Richardson Gosline published a paper entitled “Human Favoritism, Not AI Aversion” which studied how people perceive work created by generative AI, humans, or some combination of the two. And the findings are very interesting.

Two key insights emerged. First, when people had no information about the source of the marketing or campaign copy, they preferred the results generated by AI. “Generative AI is showing that it can be as good as or better than humans at these kinds of persuasive tasks,” Zhang said.

But when people were told the source of the content, their estimation of work in which humans were involved went up — they expressed “human favoritism,” as the researchers put it. Their assessment of content created by AI, though, didn’t change, undermining the notion that people harbor a form of algorithmic aversion.

Check out an overview of the study on the MIT Sloan website here.