Now, don’t get me wrong. I bloody love technology. I don’t get giddy about gigahertz, RAM levels and other such technical wizardry, for me the excitement is always about what I can do with something shiny and new.
And, right now, my personal jury is out on the subject of AI. Because, well, it’s not very good.
I might be on the “wrong” side of 50 but I like to think I still have my finger on the pulse of what’s new. But like Liam Neeson I have a particular set of skills, and included amongst those is more than 30 years of being paid to write. So by now I’m quite good at it.
And I have yet to find an AI which could write anything that I didn’t have to tidy up. Extensively. Which is time I could have spent writing whatever’s required from scratch in the first place. But this is what I do for a living. Your mileage may vary.
It’s not just words where AI struggles: yesterday my girlfriend wanted to use AI to adapt a photo. It was a lovely family pic but missing my daughter, who she was keen to include. ChatGPT’s first pass added my daughter to the photo – twice. When asked to try again, every single person in the photo was changed to look a little like my daughter. Which was weird to say the least.
And it took me about 3 minutes in Photoshop to do a version that was good enough for her phone lock screen. Because I *understood* what was required. It made sense to me. It was a simple task that I didn’t need to overcomplicate.
So, call me a relic if you like. But I’m really not, I promise. I love the shiny but only when it adds something to my life and doesn’t just add a new layer of complexity.