I wrote a blog post about AI a few months ago. I was critical about some of the technologies created using AI, as well as intrigued by others. But, having never used AI, all I had to go on was what I’d read, and opinions I’d gathered, as well as news stories about AI accidents and the cons of using it. I had also heard of students using AI to cheat in school.

I have, over the course of the last few months, had the opportunity to see AI used as well as to use it in the form of ChatGPT. I have found it hilarious at times, and frustrating at other times. So I thought I would share some of those experiences.

One of the funniest recent experiences with AI was when my son had to write his final for one of his college level classes. He was busy, and he hates writing, so this paper was a thorn in his side. As I was listening to him, he said he was just going to use AI to write the paper. He really wasn’t going to (I hope!), but he was testing my reaction, so I told him to just go ahead and try, but do not turn it in as his work.

He typed in the parameters and the response from AI was hilarious. It stated that it could tell he was probably trying to write a paper for a class and that it would not write the paper for him, but gave him several links to information about the subject matter. While I found this funny, he found it annoying. He eventually did get the paper written and got an A with no help from AI like he’d hoped.

I have also watched a number of YouTube videos about people using ChatGPT to come up with ideas for new products for print-on-demand. I decided to try it with a couple of t-shirt ideas. Rather quickly I decided I needed to learn more about how it worked in order to write a better description of what I wanted, to get a better result from AI. At which point, how much work should you have to put into trying to get out of work, if that’s what you’re using AI for.

Recently I have updated my Etsy shop and discovered that it can write pretty good product description when I type in good parameters. You can check out my Etsy shop to read the descriptions ChatGPT came up with, or at least some of what it came up with. I have found after using it that it rarely writes anything exactly how I’d like it to sound, so while it’s nice to have a base to begin from, it’s not without it’s faults and need for corrections within the body of the text.

Do I think AI will replace the need to write new content, to create new stories, to inform and educate ourselves? No. The biggest problem with AI is that nothing it creates is original work. AI can only pull from what’s already been created. There will always be a need for thinkers, for doers, for dreamers. New ideas and technology cannot come from AI. While it does help with some things, the human experience cannot be lived by or through AI.

AI can be fun to play with. If you’ve never played around with ChatGPT, give it a try to see the fun things it can come up with. But I also fear that AI has the potential to send the human race backward as we rely too much on what’s at our fingertips and not enough on our own ability to think, reason, understand, create, and progress. Have you tried using AI or ChatGPT? What has been your experience? Lastly, all the images I used in this post were AI generated. Some are obvious as they couldn’t be real, but some are a little harder to tell they aren’t photos. Did any of them fool you?