AI - Part I

I’ve now written a couple of books, one published and one in editing, that include major characters and plot points related to Artificial Intelligence. In real life, though, I’ve been slow to adopt the new technology. Not sure why, because I’ve always been interested in the latest and greatest. I stood in line at a Best Buy in Kansas City to get one of the first iPads. The store had only five, and I got the fourth one. I still remember watching Raiders of the Lost Ark on a plane flight and seeing the reflection on the screen of a guy in the row behind me craning his neck over the seatback to see the sleek new device. Even further back, I enjoyed video games and wanted to have the newest consoles and games. And before that, I bought into new tech like compact discs. I have a history, as you can see. Which adds weight to the question: why wait to adopt AI?

Maybe because so far its implementation has been done in a way that’s not natural for me to use. Take Siri, for example. I’m a reader and typer, not a talker and listener. Reading is my preferred method of learning, and I’d much rather type a phrase into a Google search page and quickly read the results than to have to speak what I want and have the nice Irish lady give me the results. Yes, my Siri has an Irish accent. Anyway, I can type almost as fast as people talk, and I can read faster than someone can recite a list of bullet points. I know, there are other forms of AI besides Siri. I’ve given a little bit of a look at ChatGPT and asked it some questions about writing and my books, but the results weren’t very consistent. For example, I copied in the text of a book and requested a summary. It listed some of the very minor characters as major ones, confused some of the settings, and so on. Not very reliable. Why do I bring up that example? Well, mainly because it relates to writing and AI. And to the story I’m going to tell you next. Hang on ‘til Tuesday to find out more.