Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a topic that I plan to explore frequently with posts on this site. I find AI to be absolutely fascinating.
I should perhaps point out though that as a physicist I am also quite fascinated by nuclear explosions. So “fascinating” is not necessarily a “Good Thing.” There is no denying that the human race’s foray into nuclear energy has fundamentally changed our world, and it seems to me that AI has at least as much potential.
For now at least, I do view AI as a Good Thing. I use it liberally in my day-to-day life. Whenever I get stuck on something technical, I’ll go ask AI for help, and I’d estimate that at least 80% of time it helps me past my sticking point. It is not a stretch to say that this website (or at least my technical contributions to it) would not exist without AI.
But as an experiment, I went further than just asking AI to help solve technical issues: I asked AI to generate a content post for this site. The prompt that I used was nothing fancy:
create a new post for a website www.retiredthinker.com that explores how AI is beneficial to retired thinkers
The result is How AI Enhances the Lives of Retired Thinkers, the next post in this series. I just slightly reformatted what AI produced to make it consistent with other posts here.
Obviously, I was impressed with the quality of what it produced (else I wouldn’t have posted it). I posted it not to generate quick and easy content for the website, but just to demonstrate what AI is capable of doing.
Note that I credited this post with Artificial Intelligence as the author. I hereby pledge not to post any other purely AI-generated content on this site, at least not without crediting Artificial Intelligence as the author. However, I do not pledge to not use AI to correct and improve the quality of content that originated from me. I don’t even pledge to not steal ideas for a good post or a particularly well-worded sentence from something that AI produced.
And, full disclosure: many of the images used on this site are also generated by AI. AI’s ability to produce such images is even more amazing to me than it’s ability to produce quality verbiage. Most of the images came from this site, using nothing much more than the title of the post as the prompt. E.g., to generate the image for this post, the prompt was
AI thoughts from a human, featuring an older guy with gray hair and a short beard, in the style of a cartoon
For the AI-generated post, note that I just credited it to Artificial Intelligence in general, not the specific large language model that produced it. The model that actually produced the post text was not some top-of-the-line cutting-edge model, it was just a model simply called ‘Lite’ (within the context of Warp, see here) that I was using because I had exhausted my free quota for other more advanced models (see also Cheapskating).
