Curious about AI? Me too!

We see those letters a lot lately - AI. And those two letters can inspire awe and fascination, create fear of the unknown, and foster distrust all at the same time. It seems like a black hole that can suck us right in the minute we start to learn anything about it.

I’ve been diving in – to learn the good, the bad and the ugly - and I’m sharing my thoughts in this blog post. Read on to find out what it is, how we can use it and what I’ve been doing with AI.

This post is my take on AI as of today. My opinion changes constantly as AI is evolving so quickly that the AI app you just used an hour ago may now work differently.  And because this is such a huge topic, I’m narrowing my focus to my own experiences as an artist business owner and curious person. 

What on earth is AI?  

As a retired software engineer (aka programmer), I am familiar with the idea of creating computer systems that solve business problems, automate complex processes, and support businesses in many ways. And these days, there seems to be an app for everything. Apps are just programs that serve a purpose. This type of programming has been going on for many decades and we use it one way or another in our day-to-day lives.

AI is different. My first thought was “isn’t that just programming”? Well, yes. It is programming by people who instruct computers to perform AI functions. BUT its real strength in my opinion is how quickly “it” can make “educated” deductions and decisions using a truly vast, mind-blowing amount of data that is at “its fingertips”. I’ve read that AI has access to just about everything ever put out on the internet. Imagine that?

Side note: Why am I using quotes? Because people often interact with AI like they are talking to a friend, a trusted advisor, a human being. I feel strongly that AI is NOT a person. It is a computer (well a heck of a lot of computers). Some think of “it” as a robot. When I interact with AI, I treat it like the non-human thing that it is – as a computer.  

For example, the human interaction with AI might look like “Please tell me what you think about planting tulip bulbs in my area this time of year? Thank you.”. While asking a computer for information might look like “Provide planting information for tulips in my area this time of year.”. Subtle I know.  

Why does this matter to me and what’s the difference? I can’t exactly say but I think it’s dangerous to attribute humanness to computers. It gives them a heck of a lot of power in our minds somehow. It’s a gut-feeling type of thing and maybe I’ll understand these feelings more as time goes on. I’ve heard it’s good to be polite to AI and to treat it like you are talking to and teaching a toddler. I get that, because AI is always expanding its knowledge base just like kids do and we often are the ones providing that input to AI as you’ll read below.  

What can AI do for us?

The answer is that AI has limitless potential.  Have you tried anything AI? Maybe you have and you don’t even realize it. Some AI is hiding in plain sight, and some AI has become ‘forced’ on us.

For example, have you noticed that Google searches are producing AI answers first – above ads that businesses pay for to have their ads up at the top of the search results. Now those paid ads are listed AFTER the AI results, much to the dismay of paying companies.

Also, if you use an app to edit your photos, some features use AI and you may not even realize it. And on and on. Even my own email provider, AO, is using AI. It shows very short AI summaries of each incoming email to help me know which emails might be of interest to me. I didn’t ask for that feature and yet there it is.

Keep in mind that I agree with the common opinion that AI is a TOOL. Anything produced by AI should be scrutinized and refined by YOU. That said..

Here are a few key points about AI:

• Did you know that AI can produce text (think essays, blog posts (not this one 😁), social media content, etc.), video (yes it can and some are completely real looking), images of all sorts, voice/audio, and music?

• There are many apps and websites you can use to do these things. It is very easy to get overwhelmed by them all. My advice is to pick 1 or 2 apps and stick with them for a while. My own go to’s right now are Chatgpt (for almost everything) and Midjourney (for image generation). More on those apps in a minute.

• The key to using AI is learning to tell write prompts. That means you describe in words exactly what you want from AI to get your desired results. ‘Exactly’ is the key here – the more specific you are, the more refined the results will be. There is skill in learning how to prompt. Many people are specializing prompting AI – so they can help others use AI effectively. This has become a whole new field of consulting.

  • When you open up Chatgpt, you see a text box. That’s it! Type in what you want and it will give your results. Here’s an example:

    • I typed this prompt into the text box: Tell me the supplies I need to start a brand new hobby of painting with watercolors. I plan to paint flowers and plants.

    • The result is an in-depth list of all of the supplies I might need to start my new hobby. Go to Chatgpt and copy/paste that prompt and watch the results appear! 😲

  • Mind blowing fact – when you learn to prompt well, you can get what you need right from AI as if you hired an expert consultant. This is a very useful and yet scary thing with lots of implications. It can ‘act like’ an expert in just about any field, such as nutrition, tax law, medical conditions, research studies in any field, veterinary science, more than I can imagine.

  • Quick tip - If you don’t know what to type in as a prompt, just ask it what you need to provide to get the results you desire. For example, “What information should I provide here to create a weekly food plan for my family?”. Chatgpt will return with questions or a list of things you should tell it so that it can craft a food plan tailored for your family’s preferences. Give it a try!
    
    

• Chatgpt is truly AMAZING in all that it can do for pretty much anyone. It’s like Google results that are on steroids. Think of AI as doing a Google search for what you need and then it consolidates ALL the pages of Google search results – all the websites of information - into one cohesive response that is tailored just for you. 🤯

  • For personal use:

    • Create food plans, shopping lists, provide recipes based on food you list from your fridge and pantry

    • Help research medical conditions for people and pets (does not replace trained doctors!)

    • Help for baby care for new parents

    • Provide brainstorming help for anything you want to do. I like to use it to help brainstorm ideas for new art collections including color choices, subject matter, reference material and more

    • Help you learn just about any topic – foreign language, how to cook a complex meal, how to fix a leaky sink, how to get wine out of the carpet, etc.

    • Travel planning

    • Gift ideas

    • Event planning – Yes it can give you location specific answers if you ask for that

    • Mental health and wellness support such as journal prompts and helpful meditations, references to local or online support

    • Help with budgeting, saving money, paying off debt in the best way possible

    • It is crazy, isn’t it?

  • For business use:

    • Write business plans

    • Do market research on new ideas complete with supporting references to quoted statistics

    • Create social media or ad campaigns complete with posts (hook, captions and images - Chatgpt can produce images)

    • Create business documents of all sorts. It can read files that you attach and then interpret them as you request. For example, attach transcripts from meetings and ask it to summarize them into a concise list or 10 paragraphs or whatever you need.

    • Create basic branding for your business based on your industry and your preferences

    • Write business correspondence of all sorts in your 'voice’ as you’ve defined it

    • Provide image assets for your website, newsletter, online course, etc. For example, I used it to help me create images of ‘frustrated photographers’ and ‘confident photographers’ for marketing of my online course “Take Your Best Shot: Great Photos Made Simple”.

    • So much more
      
      
      

Here are the AI images for a 'frustrated photographer' and a 'confident photographer'. How else would I create these in 10 seconds or less in the 'real world'? Are these based on real people? I hope not and I would never sell them just in case! 

Here’s what I’ve been doing with AI

I’ve taken a few classes and watched free training videos on AI of all different sorts. I love learning and this is a whole new world to me. I’m using Chatgpt and Midjourney.

• Chatgpt is great for when I want to brainstorm ideas for my art practice and business, to create draft social media posts, to refine blog posts and emails, for planning my workshops and promoting my online photography course, etc.

  • For my recent in-person painting workshop, I wrote up my agenda and student hand out. I then used Chatgpt to get more ideas for value to provide to students, to provide sample images that we could use for painting reference, and to see if there were ‘holes’ in my agenda given the goals that I had for the class. Could I have done all of that myself? Yes. Did it help me fill in some gaps and make the class more comprehensive? Yes.
    

  • I could copy this post into Chatgpt and ask it to make it more concise. While I think you'd appreciate that, I wanted to use my own words straight from me for this post. I bet I'd have saved about 100 words! 😁
    
    

• My experimentation with image generation has been so fun! My first attempts at using image generation AI resulted in hilarious and unreliable results. I’m all about animals so I started there. I saw Bison with 5 legs and 2 heads, Greyhounds with many misplaced ears and eyes, human heads on animals, etc. AI has gotten better at this quite rapidly and I can now generate real looking animals using Midjourney.

  • There is a huge opportunity for fantasy images. It seems like anything you can dream up and write in a prompt, you can have AI create instantly, right before your eyes.

  • Image styles can be specified and range from known artists like Van Gogh, cartoons, manga style, baroque period art, etc. Yes, there are copyright concerns – that’s a whole different topic! To stay ‘safe’ create image prompts that do not use styles that are owned by others – like Disney style cartoons.  And read the fine print of any app you use that is producing AI content of any sort.

  • My focus has been on creating images in different styles based on my own photos of my dogs, trips we’ve taken and so on. Here are two AI image examples. I love pickleball and my dogs so here they are in a sweet cartoony form playing pickleball. I imagined it and here it is! Thanks to Midjourney and a little editing by me in Photoshop.

Willow & Niki playing pickleball! 

The elephant in the room

Is AI ethical and moral? Should I use it knowing it has been built using images, text, videos, voices created by real people and businesses? Can I sell what I create with AI? Are my prompts that I type into AI being used to help ‘train’ AI? Are my ideas being stolen constantly by AI to be used by others?

These questions are relevant. Each of us must decide how we want to deal with these issues. For me, I know my opinion on AI changes almost daily. AI is here. I don’t believe it’s going away. Many believe we need to make the best of it, embrace what we can and hope that it won’t be misused. How it could be misused is a whole different topic to dive into by people way smarter than me.

The book “Scary Smart” by Mo Gawdat was referred to me recently and I started listening to it on audible. I have to admit that YES it is scary and I stopped listening for now. I’m not ready to ‘go there’ to the big future of AI as some see it like Mr. Gawdat. 

In Conclusion

So what do you think? I hope this made you think about how you may like to use AI, or not. Maybe I've sparked your interest to learn what it can do in your life.

My take on it right now is that I’m comfortable learning about it, using it to support my life in good ways that are helpful and positive. I never use AI results as is. I tailor them to my own liking and individual style. Brainstorming with AI is fun and often sparks more ideas that I would have come up with on my own. And for me, being so visual as an artist, image generation is great fun. AI is powerful and I do like how it helps me with photo editing. It expands my skills and knowledge and I’m very careful with how I use it.

This AI thing seems to be a train that we can’t stop. Do we get on the train? Or do we walk to the future, while that train zips past us, leaving us behind?  We each need to decide where we stand. What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts and your experiences with AI. Email me here and let’s chat!

Bye for now 😎,

- Natalie