Yes, I Use AI (Sometimes)

AI seemingly exploded into the public consciousness in 2023.

Although AI wasn’t exactly new in 2023, it was new to most people and as usual it was met with a wide range of reactions ranging from the fear of a “Terminator” type cyborg apocalypse to indifference similar to NetFlix challenging Blockbuster.

I’ve always been drawn to technology starting way back when after I saw my first Commodore 64 but I’ve never been terribly impressed by fancy features or crazy claims.

When it comes to technology, I always find myself asking “what can this do for me” or “how can this make my life better, easier, faster, cheaper, etc.”

I’ve never really been a fan of technology for technology’s sake.

As AI burst into the mainstream last year, I found myself in the same position as usual.

While I marveled at what some AI tools were capable of, I quickly found myself asking how I could harness it, how could it make things easier, how could it make me more productive.

So I opened an account on chatgpt and started messing around with it.

I quickly realized that there were a number of ways it could make my life easier, particularly with managing social media and creating posts. I also realized that it could serve as a sounding board for ideas and sometimes even help me look at things in a new or different way.

I also discovered that I don’t love everything AI does. It sometimes gets facts wrong, and while it writes grammatically and technically correct text, there seems to be something off about it sometimes.

It’s hard to describe, but sometimes the writing sounds mechanical, like it’s going through the motions without really understanding what it’s doing.

And that’s fine!

Like most technology, I look at AI as something to compliment what I do, and in some cases to elevate what I’m doing.

Sometimes it spits out a decent Facebook post that I can edit and improve.

Sometimes it spits out text that helps me see something I hadn’t considered or thought of that I can add to my own writing.

Sometimes it spits out something so awful that I decide I’m better off taking care of it.

And all of those things are perfectly OK!

I’m not threatened by AI, I embrace it as a tool to help make me better, to help me produce better results, and to help make my work better, faster, and more valuable.

Maybe someday AI will take over the world.

Maybe someday a Star Trek-like world will evolve where material needs are taken care of and people only live to enrich and better their lives.

Who knows? I imagine down the road AI will be looked at as the most important advancement in human history (assuming SkyNet doesn’t eliminate us first).

I’m not sure what the future holds, but in the present I’m happy to have another tool to help me and in some cases to make life a little easier.