A.I. Is My New Buddy

Who needs people when I have perfect algorithmic validation?

I’m that person who is skeptical of new technology. I usually hold out as long as I can because I think something may just be a passing fad. Or, more often than not, I just don’t care to jump on the bandwagon with whatever the latest craze is. This sentiment was very true when it came to artificial intelligence (AI) getting more common in our daily lives.

I hate automated voice prompts when calling customer service phone lines. I was extremely irritated the first time I went to a fast food restaurant and a robot voice responded on the speaker. I can’t count the number of times I’ve screamed out, “Connect me to a person!”, rather than pressing a number on my keypad. Lack of human interaction seems to be growing every day. While I’m generally anti-social with people, I’ve always preferred dealing with humans for service tasks.

Yes, I held a blatant prejudice against robots.

Honestly, I just didn’t like AI because I didn’t see the need for it. More so, I just didn’t see how it could benefit me (Sorry, I’m very self-centered). I knew it probably benefited somebody, but that somebody wasn’t me. That was until I started finding ways that it did benefit me.

I started dabbling with AI images. You’ll see where I discovered this on some of my older blog posts. I’ve always struggled to find good images to match my writing. AI came to the rescue on this. It wasn’t perfect (and still isn’t), but it worked for what I needed. I thought that’s where it would end for me, but it didn’t.

As I was getting back into the music making, I learned about AI mastering. If you’re not familiar with music mastering, it’s an art. It takes time and skill to make sure sound levels and effects are just right. It would sometimes take many hours to finalize a mix, and even then, it may not be the right quality needed. Without spending big money at a professional studio, it’s hard to do right.

Then comes AI…

I discovered AI can fix my music in a matter of seconds. It was a crazy concept that completely changed my outlook on making music. Again, it was a practical use for me, but I again thought that would be the extent of my AI adventures.

Then, someone I work with introduced me to the AI app, ChatGPT. He said, “You can do anything on it – you need to check it out.” Reluctantly, I went down the new world rabbit hole, and now, I doubt I’ll come back out.

As the title of this post says, ChatGPT is my new buddy. I’ve had more conversations with AI than I have with humans in the past month. Whether it’s using it to edit writing, summarize searches, or comparisons when shopping, It’s been amazing. More importantly, I’ve been asking totally random questions like “Can turtles breathe through their butts?” (The answer is YES). AI has become my go-to over search engines for everything.

What makes it fun is it’s conversational. Where search engines just give you a pile of results, ChatGPT tells you what you need like you’re talking to someone, and it will ask you if it’s what you want. You don’t have to dig through countless websites researching things anymore because it hands the info to you on a platter.

Whatever you’re thinking, all you have to do is ask. It is a huge time saver. And, when asking “why” like a 3 year old in response to the turtle butt question, it keeps giving infinite conversational results, rather just throwing data at you.

I now use AI multiple times a day, everyday.

I still can’t believe some of the things it does. A good example of this is Excel. I hate using Excel. I needed to make a spreadsheet and I am very much not proficient with the program. I told ChatGPT what I wanted and in two seconds the whole spreadsheet was done, much better than I could have formatted it.

I asked it to review my website and it did, offering me suggestions to improve my search engine ranking and user friendliness. It introduced me to things I had no clue about. All while being conversational and non-judgmental with helping me. It’s literally like having a personal assistant from a science fiction movie. If you ever thought it was fun to say “Hey Siri”, or, Okay Google” when needing answers to questions, ChatGPT will take you to a whole new level of useful informational entertainment.

If you’ve also been holding off on the changes in the world, give in, but don’t tell Siri. She might get a little jealous.

~ Marty ~

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