Artificial Intelligence Tools Like ChatGPT Could Change Decision Making for the Better in Agriculture
Artificial intelligence (AI) is penetrating nearly every sector of the economy, and agriculture is no exception. Farmers are using large language models like ChatGPT to evaluate potential business deals and make sound decisions based on the information they gather. However, these technologies are still in their infancy and have limitations.
ChatGPT is a type of AI that uses natural language processing to generate responses that appear to have been written by a human being. It is trained on billions of pieces of data, creating a neural-like network that enables it to identify patterns and relationships, make predictions, and generate responses. While the potential applications of ChatGPT and other AI tools are vast, they are only as good as the information they access. A good query gets a good response, and that's sometimes trickier than it seems.
Despite these limitations, farmers like Colorado farmer Marc Arnusch are finding the technology useful. Arnusch has used ChatGPT to analyze weeds in the early stages of development, draft marketing plans for his current crop, and create spreadsheets to analyze parts of his business. He believes that the cause-and-effect relationship of ChatGPT will have a significant impact on farmers and ranchers.
However, Eugene Law, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Delaware, cautions farmers to be cautious when using large language models like ChatGPT. ChatGPT was trained on the entire content of the internet prior to 2022, and it's a self-supervised model, meaning it's been given minimal direction to what's correct or most important. It's constantly learning from user feedback, which could make it more or less coherent over time. Its responses don't cite sources, so it's hard to know whether it's getting information from a scientific study or a farmer's personal blog, and it occasionally makes mistakes or makes things up. Therefore, users must determine fact from fiction.
Farmers Business Network recently launched a ChatGPT-based agronomic adviser named Norm, which is built on ChatGPT 3.5 but has additional "training." According to Kit Barron, the head of data science at FBN, Norm has been trained to look at FBN's library of published blogs as well as its product warehouse before searching publicly available data such as weather insights, soil monitoring, application rates, product labels, current events, university research and grower commentary. Norm is still in the beta version stage, but feedback from farmers will make the program better.
AI tools like ChatGPT have the potential to revolutionize the agriculture industry by increasing efficiency and productivity. As these technologies continue to evolve, it will be interesting to see how they impact farmers and ranchers as they make crucial decisions.
