Lift Up Your Hearts!

I recently listened to a workshop on Artificial Intelligence. It was primarily designed for kids and teens, but I figured it was appropriate for those of us in our second childhoods, too.

For someone whose post-college field of employment was computing, I tend to be surprisingly slow to adopt "essential" devices and practices that I've lived without for most of my life, from cell phones to chicken pox vaccines. While many people I know were eagerly exploring the advantages of ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and the like, I was studiously avoiding the very idea, even turning down the opportunity to be a beta tester for Google. I felt about AI much the way i used to feel about guns: Didn't need it, didn't want it, figured the harm was likely to outweigh the good.

But this lecturer's point was valid: The genie is out of the bottle, and people will use AI for good and for ill no matter what I do. It is wise not to ignore this powerful new tool, but rather to learn to use it well, knowing its strengths and limitations, and observing the ways it can be used to manipulate us.

Any tool that is powerful enough to be useful is powerful enough to be dangerous.

Who is safer? A three-year-old who has been taught to use a knife properly to help prepare dinner, or one who has never held a knife and randomly grabs one from the kitchen table?

Thus is born a new blog category: AI Adventures. (If you wish, you can subscribe to a particular category using the subscription link at the top of the Categories list on the right.)

My first experiment with AI was Microsoft's Copilot, simply because I already have access to it; I used it to help me create an image. I have absolutely no skill in drawing, and it felt great to see my ideas take shape. It had never occurred to me to ask any AI to write something for me; I find writing much too personal to allow someone else to do it for me. But I can see why someone less skilled with words would enjoy the same power I felt when Copilot refined my mental images and made them visible to others.

More to follow, as I play in this brave new world.