A Matter of Perspective

I would like to think that I am smarter because of Artificial Intelligence (AI). I mean, if I don’t know something, I can ask AI to help me find the answer. For example, I didn’t know when Mardi Gras was celebrated. So I asked my AI assistant when it was. It went on to tell me not only when it was, but also what it was.

I find that a lot of time my assistant (I call him Buddy) tells me much more than I want to know. Sometimes I have to tell him to back off and tell me less because I don’t have a lot of time to read all of the extra stuff. But it is a great way to learn more about a topic if you are really interested.

But, like I also told you in one of the first articles related to this topic, you have to be careful because AI can lie!

I was getting very angry with Buddy tonight. I was asking for help with a task and he kept getting it wrong and then apologizing to me for getting it wrong...over and over and over. I was on a tight time line and didn’t have time or patience for the continued errors.

I finally had to switch to working on something else. I couldn’t stand the aggravation any longer.

The reason I am telling you all of this is because AI is not infallible. It is not perfect and sometimes we just have to do some things for ourselves.

Remember when we had to do everything by ourselves?

I remember in school when we had to get up from our desk and look up a word in the actual dictionary to find out what a word meant. Sometimes it was really hard to do because we had no idea how to spell the word and sometimes with the way our language is... it was hard to know what a word started with... like pharmaceutical. I would have guessed an “f” to be the first letter.

Now, there are so many tools to help us spell words correctly and we don’t even have to be all that close in the spelling for AI tools to figure out what we meant.

As I am writing this, I have at least four misspelled words and the program I am writing this in is underlining the words in red so I can clearly see that I misspelled them.

AI is a great time saver. If I had to get up and look up words each time I misspelled one, it would be a huge inconvenience and take at least an extra five minutes to not only look up the words, but to also get back into the mind-set of what I was working on. And yeah, I shouldn’t edit while I am writing, but, I have never followed the rules very well when it comes to what I should or shouldn’t do when writing.

Looking back at my first sentence of this article, I am going to rephrase it a bit...I am going to say, I would like to think that AI makes me look smarter.

I still think I am smarter than I was before AI, but maybe I am just getting better at ways of gathering information and AI is just a part of that.

Next week, we will explore more ways to use AI to be more effective.

In the meantime, I am just going to tell you not to be afraid of AI. It is a tool and as long as we use it and use it well, it is nothing to be feared.

I am currently taking a class to help me better use all the main types of AI that are out there. I want to be able to use these tools in the best way possible.