On Our Artificial Overlords – The Good Side!

Welcome back to Will's Dumb Brain, your weekly slice of ponderings from the less-explored corners of my cranium! This week, we're wrestling with the big, shiny conundrum that is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Everywhere you look, folks are squabbling over whether AI is going to be humanity’s knight in glowing data armor or the villain in a techno-thriller we didn’t sign up for. But here's a twist: what if AI is just... a tool? Yep, like a toaster, but smarter and doesn't make breakfast.

Did you notice anything different about that introduction? A certain soullessness, perhaps? Well, you’re correct! That introductory paragraph was entirely generated using just a single prompt from the ChatGPT 4 LLM (I promise the rest of this essay will be 100% pure farm-raised, grass-fed, human thoughts). I know my audience ranges in age from 20-somethings all the way up to those old enough to remember when AI was the stuff of farfetched science fiction, so I’m not sure how many of you have spent much time messing around with Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Diffusion Models like DALL-E, but you’ve certainly heard a lot of hand wringing about them.

I want to talk about these technological marvels in the context of tools, as ChatGPT so kindly introduced for me at the top. This week, the positive side: these things kick ass at certain tasks! Want a recipe for dinner that takes a specific amount of time and only includes the items you already have in your fridge? Dude, AI is soo good at that kind of thing! Want to plan an itinerary for a city you’re going to visit but don’t know where to start? Seriously, just go ask an LLM and it’ll come up with some extremely good suggestions. Want to brainstorm some ideas for your new discopunk-spacesynth-nintendocore-chiptunes band? These models will give you idea after idea after idea.

The thing about using these models well is that all of the above suggestions are jumping-off points, they’re getting the snowball rolling enough for you to take over. If you’re looking for gift ideas or inspiration for a themed party or advice on a weightlifting routine, these things are absolutely aces!

A few months back we had a big ole pizza party and I ran into what felt like a grade school math problem: how many pizzas do we order for our group of 50 people? I don’t know what your gut reaction number is but mine was, “oh god what if we don’t get enough and people are mad and hungry? What if we get too many and we have 15 extra pizzas that I will definitely eat over the course of the next week even though it will make me sick and I know I shouldn’t!” Well, ChatGPT helped me figure out that 14 pizzas was the right number considering our group and wouldn’t you know it, we ended the day with a little over one extra pizza and everyone having eaten their fill!

So, AI can be pretty swell for inspiration, planning, and complex pizza math. There is, however, a downside to this technological wonder…but we’ll talk all about that next week!

Have you used AI in your everyday life? Are you scared of it? Just don’t know where to start? Let me hear all about your experience!