AI

I am finding my way in it.

There are the staunch opposers to the mere existence and use of AI, while there are those who herald its potential. Many I talk to are simultaneously fascinated and terrified. As an author I vow to never give it input to my fiction stories. I’ll never let it sink its webby mind into my poetry.

Last week I listened to a webinar on use of AI in my former field of practice-Speech Pathology. The fascination part was piqued. In my 40 year career I went from making purply smeary therapy materials on a ditto machine, to black and white Xerox copies I had to color, to full color copies in seconds. I remember starting the school year with stacks of catalogues from companies. My meager purchasing budget for selecting a few sparkly new therapy materials brought Christmas in September. Then those catalogues ended up in the recycle bin because we were now searching on line. I ended my career with subscriptions to companies where I could search a data base for target activities and download for use on my device. No ordering, no waiting, minimal expenditure.

I’ve been fully retired for 2 years and AI generation of materials is entering the arena and I exclaim, “Wow!” The speaker was greatly aware of inappropriate uses of AI but when she demonstrated being able to input a list of words and ask AI to create a matching picture activity, or generate a set of pictures beginning with S, or a set of present/past tense verbs and receive them in seconds-Oh my God! You have no idea how much time I spent over the years, searching pictures, cutting and pasting so they provided the exact activity I needed for a student. The cherry on top was when AI got it wrong and she could then tell it how to correct it. It took a couple redirects, but it did!

Recently I created a social media reel for marketing one of my novels. Each page had a caption. A little bubble popped up saying ‘Hal’, the AI bot, could evaluate my captions. Cautiously I said, “Okaaay.” Some I dismissed but one stated my purpose of facilitating engagement better than I had. There are many human social media guru representatives I could hire to do that. Much like I could hire someone to market my book for me. I don’t dismiss their role, they could remove my sizable learning curve in self marketing and use their expertise to guide just right placement, but I also recognize my clicking ‘Ok.’ elevated the presence of my own shoe-string budget free marketing attempt.

My take away is that our brain’s gray matter is still better than AI. We have the analysis skills to discern where it’s wrong and where it’s right for us.

Are there any parts that are right for you?

***Content written from my own gray matter and not AI.

***The photo of my character in The Nickel Loop was AI generated developed from my description.