Confessions of an AI Fanboy: How artificial intelligence amazes and dazes, dazzles and frazzles

Category: Artificial Intelligence

  • AI has invaded the grocery store! (Well, the magazine rack, anyway…)

    You can see why it caught my eye…

    I haven’t wrestled with whether to buy a magazine THAT much in a long, long time.

    Any fellow magazine fans know how things have evolved/splintered into countless categories – from self-help to a wide array of lifestyle, sports, etc. etc. (and many have gone up in price – all those $14.99 “special editions!).

    (Side note: Why is it so HARD to buy and read these special editions digitally? I do like having something fresh and trendy for the coffee table, on occasion, but..!!??)

    By the way, speaking of old-fashioned paper, in recent months, I’ve picked up some cool AI-focused volumes – often NOT the stuff you read in the daily tide of newsletters and article posts – from Time Magazine, Scientific American, The Street and now…. “How to Hack Your Life with ChatGPT,” from McClatchy Lifestyle & Entertainment.

    (I LOVE the weekly tech magazine I get on my Nook, called Tech News Life. But oy, the Masthead, with dead links and email addresses, recently took me down a weird rabbit hole. I was assisted by the folks at the great magazine/newspaper app I have, Magzter. Highly recommended!)

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  • What’s in a name, Part 3: AI isn’t ‘artificial’ at all – in fact, it’s super-human

    What’s in a name, Part 3: AI isn’t ‘artificial’ at all – in fact, it’s super-human

    I’ve already lamented the term artificial intelligence for where those two words take many minds.

    I’ve also called it the ultimate Rorschach test – it is whatever you see in it, or something like that.

    But amid the reams of Medium articles, etc. on how to tell AI and human writing apart, I have mentioned in comments what Perplexity points to – that blind tests already have many folks unable to tell the difference, with results pretty close to flip-of-the-coin random chance (50%).

    But while many know how Large Language Models are the sum of human output fed to them, and a word uber-prediction machine, not a “thinker” per se, many still see it as this … robotic “other,” a human creation run amok that is somehow wrong, if not downright evil.

    Words, of course, carry positive or negative connotations, which can vary from person to person.

    But to me, we need yet another way to look at this new tool, which can recall – notice I didn’t say “thinks” or “knows” – the sum of human output and daresay existence – albeit imperfectly (another odd/dumb term, “hallucinations”) – but way, way beyond what the most genius geniuses can recall, due to the inherent nature of brains vs. how we can now store huge amounts of what’s loosely, imprecisely called “data.”

    Somehow, it’s all cast as this tug of war for humans’ future, as in one “side” wins, the other loses, flung into the mud, rope burns on their hands. If you’re “for” AI’s future, you’re “against” humans ruling the roost.

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