You know when technology advances, we sometimes get very excited. Over the past couple of years, we have watched AI kind of dominate technology in America and the world. Here at the Tampa Bay Technology Center, we have put on more than 14 or 15 seminars by our local AI genius Tony Rockliff.
That being said, and with all of the marvelous things that we are all using AI for, I’m for some reason starting to find it incredibly annoying at times. First, let me confess that I have used AI in this very newsletter when I started it. I thought it was important for us to come in contact with our membership with just some technical information every week, not announcements, so some time ago I created this Wednesday newsletter. To be totally and completely honest with you, I chose the topic and AI did the writing. We got a lot of good response from that. But as it kept moving forward, I started realizing it wasn’t real. Yes, it was good technical information, yes it was presented well, yes it had all of the facts, but it wasn’t personal.
I have now gotten to where I can spot AI writing from 50 feet away, and I am no longer impressed with it. Some time ago, I refused to do any more of these newsletters unless I sat my happy ***** down and created it for you using my brain. But let me again be honest with you and tell you that after I write this thing, I will cut and paste it into an AI and ask it to edit it for punctuation, spelling, and grammar. I made the mistake once of asking it to also edit for clarity. Don’t ever do that because everything that you created they recreate, and it’s not good.
I do not personally enjoy AI artwork, although again I will confess that I have put some of it into this newsletter. I probably won’t do it in the future unless I want to. I am a podcaster; I do a daily podcast, and one of the things I found out was that there was an AI out there called Notebook that will take your writing and turn it into a podcast with a male and female host, and it sounds somewhat realistic but scary. I am not liking this.
They are now doing AI videos all the time. If you go onto TikTok and you watch commercials that are produced, you will see one of your famous idols on there trying to sell you a freaking vacuum cleaner on the TikTok shop, and it’s all BS because it’s all done with AI.
I am reasonably sure I’m going to get negative feedback about this, and I’m a big boy and I can take it, but what I wish for you and myself is never to stop being you and me, never stop being me, and use our creativity to make beautiful things and not rely on an AI program.
By the way, and I hate getting political, but I was watching the news early this morning and I noticed that our Secretary of Education referred to AI as “A1,” you know, like the steak sauce? I think she’s married to some wrestling promoter, which I’m sure qualified her very well to be the Secretary of Education. Perhaps she should go to a Tony seminar and learn a few things.
Now I’ve been sitting here trashing AI for a little bit; let me tell you one of the things that it has helped me immensely with on my daily podcast. Every day before I record, I will ask an AI to give me 10 talking points about the subject that I’m going to be talking about. I find that to be very effective. I don’t read them, but I glance at them and I paraphrase and I take ideas from them after I turn my microphone on. The other thing I use it for, and I probably shouldn’t, is that I have it take my talking points and turn it into a 100-word blog post that I use for my show notes on my podcast, along with hashtags which I have a very difficult time creating myself, but AI just seems to spit them out. Since I’ve been doing this and using the hashtags, I’m noticing my numbers go up rather wonderfully. So there is that. Just do what you need to do to not let it consume every aspect of your life. I would encourage you every day to go out and create beautiful things.