Understanding AI and helping it understand you (Write the Docs AU 2023)

This week I was delighted to attend Write the Docs Australia 2023. The topic of my presentation was:

Understanding AI and helping it understand you

You could say that’s ambitious. An attempt to explain machine learning, artificial intelligence, and large language models in 30 minutes!

There’s a lot of speculation at the moment about how AI might change our lives, our roles, and our jobs. Instead of adding to the speculation, I want to share some practical knowledge that technical writers can apply when thinking about AI and its impact on the world of technical documentation.

The presentation

The slides are here: bit.ly/wtd-understand-ai

I’ll add a link to the recording as soon as it’s available.

What’s in the presentation

The presentation covers these topics:

A short description of the terms AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning)An overview of how AI worksA look at the new kids on the block: LLMs (large language models)A glimpse into the ways we can tell an LLM what we want it to do

The first half of the talk is about AI in general, and gives an overview of what an AI model looks like and how it makes predictions about incoming data.

The second half focuses on Large Language Models (LLMs) and what’s special about them in comparison with other AI models. In particular, I introduce two techniques that people are experimenting with at the moment, that are useful for technical documentation:

Embeddings as a way of helping an LLM use your docs as a trusted source of informationPrompt engineering as a way of tailoring the responses from the LLM

The two techniques form the basis of a process called retrieval augmented generation (RAG). This slide from my presentation shows the overall workflow and how embeddings and prompt engineering fit in.

It’s probably best to read the deck as a whole, though, to understand what’s going on in this diagram.

Here’s the link to the slides again: bit.ly/wtd-understand-ai. I’ll add a link to the recording as soon as it’s available.

Sketch notes by Angharad Neal-Williams

Angharad Neal-Williams created amazing sketch notes to illustrate the talks at the conference. Here’s the sketch for my talk:

Kudos to the Write the Docs Australia team

Thank you to the Write the Docs Australia team for a wonderful conference. It was a great pleasure to see people in person, after so many years of pandemic-enforced virtual conferencing. Congratulations to all the organisers, speakers, and attendees!

A bouquet from the Australian bush: