Yes, my friends, I am old school. Tech today is so far beyond where things started for the masses it’s the stuff movies were made of. I got hooked on tech stuff very early on. For instance, I’m OG Commodore 64, baby. I know I’m dating myself, but I remember back in my day computer games were called MUDs, multi-user dungeons where you read the scenario and entered text to move, do battle, and chat with other players. I remember flipping out the first time I logged into Everquest as a lucky Beta Tester and saw my first Orc right there on my screen before my avatar was ripped to shreds and I read “/Loading, please wait…” for the very first time
I’m also a Star Trek girl, TOS (The Original Series) far more than Star Wars. I remember racing home from whatever fort we were playing in or whatever cave we had dug ourselves to watch the Star Trek reruns with my father religiously every Saturday afternoon. How desperately I wanted to have a communicator. Then, like techno-magic, my first mobile phone. Yes! My communicator! It was the Motorola DynaTAC, aka “The Brick” where you had to have a backpack for a purse to haul it around.
Today I relish the chance to put my “communicator” on Do Not Disturb. I don’t ask what time it is or what’s on my calendar, I ask Alexa, . The things that have changed in my lifetime are kind of staggering. And now this artificial intelligence stuff, AI, is unbelievable. Mind-blowing. What the heck? How did this happen? How did we advance this far this quickly?
Being of the era I am from; I cannot help but go to Skynet. Yes, all you Terminator fans out there know what I mean. It’s mind-boggling and it kind of freaks me out. And if you’re morally opposed to artificial intelligence, which I was for a very long time until I really needed to clone myself to get half of my shit done in a day, you’re, you never even conceptualize that it would be doing what it can do already and how it can help with all the little things. It’s very easy to be principled about something. Then all of a sudden, what? It can help me do what? That’s possible?
On the news, there was a story about a young girl in middle school whose face was AI’d onto a nude body. We knew that was going to happen. Mean Girls, bullying with AI mixed in? How could that possibly go wrong? Dear God, I am so glad I am old. I am so grateful there was no social media when I was in high school!
Just as with any human being, it’s all about how tools are used and who’s behind the wheel. There’s the issue. I also get how AI was such a huge problem with the writer’s strike. I was ill-informed. I was. But why am I not so upset about that? Because any good writing, can’t really be done from a machine. Why? Because there is no passion or heart in a machine. Anything behind AI writing is a person who has intent. It’s just like the images that were created. What is the intent? Is it to create beauty, or is it to be a mean asshat? Is it to help or harm? That’s all in our hands as human beings. So when I look at what AI can do, there are a lot of wonderful things! Look at what it’s doing for food allergies in children and medicine as a whole. AI on its own is dispassionate. It will look at the algorithms. It will look at the genomes. It will look at the bacterium, and it will come to a logical conclusion based on the data it’s fed, without any passion or moral compass to it. That’s precisely the thing, isn’t it? The moral compass. AI will never have a moral compass unless we tell it to. It is artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence isn’t about good and evil. People are.
AI is efficient and can automate tasks, taking a lot of the drudgery out of our work. It leads to increased efficiency and productivity in all kinds of places. Being able to automate posts and stuff like that for me is huge. If I can sit for one hour and get all my posts set out for the next seven days, then my time is freed up to focus on my mom and my family. That is a big deal to me. So I had to weigh the pros and cons and put my high and mighty principals aside for a bit. If I use it for good and I use it ethically and morally, in an honest way with integrity, then I don’t see a problem with that.
A lot of people in the writer community are up in arms with, the markets being flooded with AI-written books from people that can barely spell their names without spellcheck. Yes, but there is one key fact there. They’re crap! Seriously, utter crap. I’ll be honest with you, even with my latest little book I was testing the landscape on self-publishing with, I used AI to help me draft an outline, to give me a hand with structure. Anybody who’s ever written a book knows what a pain in the ass this can be. You have a concept, but how do you lay it out? That can take weeks or days because you have emotions attached to them. It’s even worse when you barely have two brain cells left. But AI can give you a jumping-off point! That can be a huge time saver!
You still have to give AI the data, the parameters. You are still behind the wheel. You can’t just stare at the blinking cursor and words magically appear. You are responsible for what is spit out by what you put in. Humans are giving it the rules. There’s the moral compass kids. What you make it do is the whole crux of the argument.
So have fun with AI! Knock yourself out! If you are a psychopath, you’re going to use just about anything, including AI to be a dick. Sorry to be harsh but I am serious here. Be a good fecking person all the time. Look up the word INTEGRITY. You either have it or you don’t.
/end rant.
