What are your thoughts about/Interactions with AI?

[Rabshakeh]

4 hours ago, Guy Berger said:

IMHO the best characterization I’ve seen is “infinite interns”.  That gives a flavor of it’s value and also its limitations

This is a brilliant description.

4 hours ago, Guy Berger said:

2/ writing bedtime stories for my kids

On the bedtime story side, the stories it writes if given free rein are quite lame.  But it can produce stuff of value (for bedtime), if you give it a promising/creative prompt.

Give us an example, please.

[Niko]

I've used AI twice, both times for work... translating code from one programming language to another worked really well, no complaints, huge efficiency gain - it's a pity I only need to do something like this every few years.... then again, maybe I should be happy. 

The second was to find the most suitable experts on a given topic ("convex analysis" iirc) in a list of 50 names. That's a task AI should be good at, much more efficient than a human, but the thing we were using (ChatGPT iirc) did an incredibly poor job, confusing one person with someone with a similar last name and generally not looking further than the first handful of names... One annoying feature I noticed is that if it gets names in the form "A. Smith, B. Miller" it will just talk about "Alfred Smith" and "Ben Miller" as if those were these people's first names... but in fact the few names that I knew were all wrong, so - it does look up the correct biography of "A. Smith" but then plugs in a random but plausible first name... Of course, with further pushing the quality of all these replies could be improved and the system will apologize excessively while correcting it's errors...You have to really like working with interns to enjoy this... 

I can easily how someone who doesn't actually care about the quality of the result will be quite happy with the AI system... For the majority of tasks, my feeling is that the biggest gains are for people who found google too abstract to really benefit from it...  But with google, you were lead to a website and then could decide for yourself whether to trust it or not... Now many people may indeed no longer leave the AI and get all information filtered and possibly randomly altered through that system... which is pretty worrying 

[Guy Berger]

20 hours ago, Rabshakeh said:

Give us an example, please.

So I’m prompting a series of humorous stories about my kids being students at a magical academy, with all sorts of zany adventures.  A recent one is a LotR parody, they go on a quest to destroy a powerful magic ringpop.  None of them are good children’s literature but they entertain my kids.

excerpt:

”

“I need more!” Sauron declared. “The One Ring Pop must not be lonely! I must surround it with Nine Grape Rings for the mortal kids, Seven Blue Raspberry for the sugar elves, and Three Watermelon Blasts for the camp counselors doomed to night duty!”

 

He stood up and declaimed:

 

 

 

🧁

“Three Rings for the Counselors, soggy and tired,

Seven for Elven teens with TikTok inspired,

Nine for Campers doomed to sticky-fingered fate,

One for the Dark Lord on his candy crate,

In the Land of Wizzlewand where the Snack Flames lie,

One Ring Pop to rule them all, and in the sugar bind them,

One to lure the children in and Ring Pop-ly remind them…

That cherry is superior. Fight me.”

🧁”

Edited June 18 by Guy Berger

[Rabshakeh]

1 hour ago, Guy Berger said:

So I’m prompting a series of humorous stories about my kids being students at a magical academy, with all sorts of zany adventures.  A recent one is a LotR parody, they go on a quest to destroy a powerful magic ringpop.  None of them are good children’s literature but they entertain my kids.

excerpt:

”

“I need more!” Sauron declared. “The One Ring Pop must not be lonely! I must surround it with Nine Grape Rings for the mortal kids, Seven Blue Raspberry for the sugar elves, and Three Watermelon Blasts for the camp counselors doomed to night duty!”

 

He stood up and declaimed:

 

 

 

🧁

“Three Rings for the Counselors, soggy and tired,

Seven for Elven teens with TikTok inspired,

Nine for Campers doomed to sticky-fingered fate,

One for the Dark Lord on his candy crate,

In the Land of Wizzlewand where the Snack Flames lie,

One Ring Pop to rule them all, and in the sugar bind them,

One to lure the children in and Ring Pop-ly remind them…

That cherry is superior. Fight me.”

🧁”

I gotcha 

[Pim]

i use ChatGPT mainly to alleviate the annoying and boring aspects of my work. in education we have to justify a lot of things in writing. the mountain of policy documents keeps growing and although you are obliged to have it all on paper, there is not a soul who reads it... it is mind-numbing and demotivating. because I am half in front of the class and half in management as a department head, it takes up an even larger part of my work. in this area AI is real and a godsend. it produces high-quality documents, can critically review and test them and gives good instructions in areas that I know less about. it really saves me hours of work that I can now put into my lessons and students. in addition, I notice that ChatGPT can search much more efficiently and specifically than a search engine.

another way I use it is to clear up difficult passages in philosophy books I read. For exception now with Hegels book, it provides excellent explanations and summary’s which make me able to check if I actually understood what I’ve read.
 

it could also be very useful with jazz music. You could ask for 10 albums where Evan Parker plays solo saxophone or on which albums a specific jazz musician played with another. of course I realize that ChatGPT makes mistakes. when I asked as a trick question whether Charlie Parker and Coltrane had ever made a recording together, he replied that they had indeed 🫣

Edited June 19 by Pim

[Teasing the Korean]

I've never personally interacted with Al, but he is touring with Brian's backing band, and his son Matt beautifully sings Brian's high parts, so it should be fun.