AI Tools May Not Transform Agriculture, but Will Help Farmers, Experts Predict

In the three months since it was first unveiled, OpenAI’s arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered chat­bot has cap­tured the gen­eral pub­lic’s imag­i­na­tion.

OpenAI no longer pub­lishes offi­cial use fig­ures but said 1 mil­lion users signed up for the free ser­vice in the first five days.

The large lan­guage model-based gen­er­a­tor – fed on bil­lions of data points, includ­ing books, news arti­cles and other web con­tent – can instantly answer ques­tions, though not always accu­rately, and mimic cre­ative writ­ing styles.

Since its inau­gu­ra­tion, peo­ple from a wide range of sec­tors have been try­ing to fig­ure out how best to har­ness the unprece­dented power of this arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to make their busi­nesses more effi­cient.

ChatGPT is unlikely to rev­o­lu­tion­ize agri­cul­ture, but experts sug­gest that it could help farm­ers with research and tasks, such as writ­ing web­site con­tent and mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial.

Heng Ji, a pro­fes­sor of com­puter sci­ence at the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign, told Olive Oil Times that large lan­guage model-based gen­er­a­tors could help farm­ers per­form tasks where human judg­ment can be used to assess the accu­racy of the infor­ma­tion.

“But we should not really think of this as a mag­i­cal tool that can solve all the prob­lems,” she said.

For exam­ple, Ji said farm­ers could ask ChatGPT how to plant spe­cific crops in cer­tain regions or cli­matic con­di­tions and expect to receive accu­rate advice.

ChatGPT could also sum­ma­rize the find­ings of sci­en­tific stud­ies or pro­vide prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion, such as how to repair a piece of equip­ment.

“A large lan­guage model is just mem­o­riz­ing a sequence of tokens,” she said. ​“It is about the aggre­ga­tion of human expe­ri­ences from the past. It’s basi­cally gath­ered all the data from the whole web before 2021 and mem­o­rized it.”

Ji warned that large lan­guage model-based gen­er­a­tors – despite what they claim when asked – can­not engage in the process known as sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery.

For exam­ple, ChatGPT says it can help farm­ers by pre­dict­ing future cli­matic con­di­tions and mar­ket prices. However, Ji explained why this is not pos­si­ble.

“It does not have deep rea­son­ing abil­i­ties,” she said. ​“It can­not pre­dict the future. If you are ask­ing the model to dis­cover some­thing about a new con­di­tion or some tasks that it’s never observed before, it’s not going to do that [accu­rately].”

“It will gen­er­ate an answer in flu­ent English, but there’s no knowl­edge ground­ing capa­bil­ity, and there’s no guar­an­tee about the truth­ful­ness of the answer,” Ji added. ​“The sys­tem was not designed for rea­son­ing or dis­cov­er­ies.”

Todd Janzen, an attor­ney spe­cial­iz­ing in agri­cul­tural law, agrees. He asked ChatGPT: ​“What are the top five ways that ChatGTP will rev­o­lu­tion­ize agri­cul­ture in the United States?” Among the responses, ChatGPT said it could use its abil­i­ties for data analy­sis and pre­dic­tions.

“If you knew noth­ing about agri­cul­ture, you would think ChatGPT’s pre­dic­tions were pretty amaz­ing,” Janzen wrote in Successful Farming mag­a­zine. ​“These pre­dic­tions come across as very author­i­ta­tive and knowl­edgable.”

“But peel back the veneer, and you find a kind of word salad that sounds impres­sive but lacks much depth or mean­ing,” he added. ​“Most of these five points are just regur­gi­tat­ing the same con­cepts: data analy­sis and pre­dic­tion.”

Before ChatGPT can become a rev­o­lu­tion­ary tool for farm­ers, Ji believes that the prob­lem around the accu­racy of its answers must first be fixed.

She added that researchers are already work­ing on their own large lan­guage model-based gen­er­a­tors. One specif­i­cally geared toward agri­cul­ture could be cre­ated, where all the responses would be based on con­firmed knowl­edge. However, even this would still be unable to pre­dict the future.

While ChatGPT and other sim­i­lar AI chat­bots are unlikely to change how farm­ers do their jobs, the rapid advance of the tech­nol­ogy may still have some pro­found con­se­quences for the sec­tor.

“My expe­ri­ence is that the agri­food sec­tor is way more frag­ile than oth­ers in terms of poten­tial biases intro­duced by the AI tools such as ChatGPT,” Yu Jiang, an agritech researcher at Cornell University, told Olive Oil Times.

“It’s impor­tant not only to con­sider how to let grow­ers use ChatGPT but also how to develop dig­i­tal con­tent strate­gi­cally (in col­lab­o­ra­tion with ChatGPT) to influ­ence the mod­els,” he added.

For exam­ple, Jiang’s research with the AI chat­bot has demon­strated that its answers to ques­tions about wine rec­om­men­da­tions are biased toward com­pa­nies with exten­sive dig­i­tal foot­prints.

“If some­one uses ChatGPT APIs [a tool that allows dif­fer­ent soft­ware or appli­ca­tions to com­mu­ni­cate] to cre­ate a rec­om­men­da­tion app, espe­cially for new cus­tomers, these small winer­ies would lose their mar­ket share very fast, result­ing in fur­ther con­sol­i­da­tion of the agri­food com­mu­nity,” he said.

With the inte­gra­tion of ChatGPT into Bing, a search engine, the shift to AI-based search looks increas­ingly inevitable. Jiang warned that small farm­ers must adapt quickly or risk being left behind.

“If diver­sity is a part of resilience, we should encour­age the grow­ers to start to think actively with these new AI tools that are not designed for agri­cul­ture and food appli­ca­tions and build dig­i­tal lit­er­acy and train­ing mate­ri­als for grow­ers to embrace the change,” he con­cluded.

• Successful Farming