I recently had a conversation with ChatGPT about a tree in my back yard that seems to have a couple of leafless branches and I was worried about it.
After some generic information exchanges, GPT said it would be useful if I could upload a picture of it.
For the purpose of this discussion the specifics of this whole thing don’t matter so much as the fact that I took a picture, and used Photoshop to indicate the area of concern with a red circle, and uploaded the image.
It occurred to me that we are truly in a new era. When I ask “do you see the area within the red circle and what do you think of it?” and I get an informative response based on an image analysis, this is very much a genuine human-like conversation. This is not about “pretending” to provide reasonable-sounding text responses. This is real. Or as the old saying goes, “shit’s gettin’ real”.
I generally use ChatGPT, but I’ve found that it does a much better, although not perfect job than Google translate for even common Japanese to English and vice versa.
Google translate is still better than some other “machine translations” (as we used to call them), but AI is usually better.
I once asked how long it would be if the Egyptians used the stone from the Great Pyramid to construct a road instead. Crazy how fast the answer came up. It also told me how much Lysol a sealed up White House could hold, post trump.
Being able to write a plain text report and then throw it in Claude saying “Please create a word document utilizing our brand standards skill” has genuinely increased not only output, but has also improved the quality of presentation.
I have had some interesting conversations with AI. There’s definitely some entertainment value there.
When I have interesting conversations with you folks, I do so with the sense that at least some of you incorporate your prior interactions with me into your current conversation, especially if they’re on roughly the same topic. The AI entities tell me that they do not continue to draw their own conclusions, that basically they are sprung into existence when I post a question to them and disappear in a puff of smoke when the conversation is over. (The data available for them to draw from may increase but the sense of a viewpoint or perspective doesn’t persist and develop over time).
There are things that I would use AI for, if it were set up that way — I’d tell the AI what my goal was in contacting my credit card company or my cable internet provider or the software company that made the software that isn’t behaving properly on my computer, and then authorize the AI to make the call and deal with the brain-dead phone tree robots and get through to a person and explain it to them and transfer the call back to me if necessary.
There is work on this taking place, with a lot of hiccups (hiccoughs?), but for understandable reasons most of the ‘agentic AI’ investment right now is happening on the company-support side…call centers, for example.
There are also examples of users setting homespun agents wild on their systems to see what happens, but (anecdotally) it has problems so far.
Yesterday I used Gemini to clean up the text of my annual self-review at work. This is a very pro-forma document for HR; salary increases are not based on it at all. It’s a hateful task that I’d left to the last possible moment.
Gemini was amazingly good for the free-form Accomplishments section. I had quite a few things to note, and typed them up in an absolute frenzy of typos, repetitiveness, and virtual incoherence. It spat out an organized list that only needed a little cleanup, removing some of the more mindless resume-speak (“…leveraged business opportunities…” etc.)
One thing it’s teaching me, for better or for worse, is to stop taking the time to type carefully and accurately. I’ve always been one to take a lot of care in this, but there’s no percentage in it anymore, and it’s actually kind of freeing to just “let fly” on the keyboard, clattering with hilarious inaccuracy at 150wpm, then tell the chatbot to clean it up, making no other changes. You have to proof the result carefully, of course, but it usually turns out to have been unnecessary to do even that.
Yeah, that really is liberating! I can just brainstorm a long list of incoherent thoughts into a LLM and it’ll still be able to make sense of it — more than another human, or my own mind, could.
Voice mode is even nicer, letting you actually just spitball your stream of consciousness out loud.
I can see why people use them for therapy or dating… for better or worse.