Taking the Plunge

The idea of AI has been piddling around in my mind for some time. The way I see it, there are two broad functions. AI can either be used broadly as a means to increase productivity, or it can be used nefariously as a means to dominate and destroy. Sure, that sounds both simplistic and morbid, but face it: you can make life better with it, or you (actually, more likely the government or corporations) can use it to blow the whole thing up. We’ve had plenty of examples already in movies like War Games and, of course, The Terminator.

I’d played a bit with ChatGPT 3.5 (the free version) but was hearing so much more about 4.0 that today I finally decided to give it a shot. At $20 a month, it sounded like a decent investment. After I bought it, someone came in to teach me some of the basics, and we played around with it.

So far…so interesting.

One of the first things we did was create an image generator for this blog. One of the challenges I face on occasion is finding pictures that don’t break copyright rules (I must admit, the only thing that saves me here is that I’m a nobody). So we told it what we wanted it to do, and there it was – done.  As easy as feeding the text of one of my posts into the GPT and it kicks something out for me.

Or, maybe just feed the entire blog into it…

Pretty wild (you’d think I was on drugs).

And of course, there’s so much more. I typed in “Teach me Spanish,” and it kicked out a few dozen lines that took me through basic vocab, grammar, and examples. Did I want more? Sure. “Conjugate the verb ‘to eat’ for me.” Done (even pointing out the difference between how things are said in Spain versus how they’re said in Latin America). “How about in past tense?” Done. “Examples?” Sure, here’s a dozen or so. It seems the only limit is quite literally my own imagination as to how I want to proceed. The bottom line is, it’ll get there for me. I can even create a GPT that might generate a new Spanish lesson for me every morning with the push of a button.

But of course, as much as I love Spanish (see previous posts on Coco and Encanto), let’s be practical. I’ve got to get going on my Korean. And that was one of the biggest drivers on my investment. I figure I started this blog a few years ago with the goal of writing every day for a year and succeeded. I started over a year ago with the goal of reading nothing but Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction for a year, and here I am (done). And now, maybe with the help of AI, I’ll get my Korean back on track in 2024.

Check back with me in a year…

Final note: I used the image generator to create the featured image on this blog page. I thought it was awful, so I asked it to make it less menacing, and the result wasn’t much better. I went with the original, but I think it’ll need a bit more training…