Hey y'all! This is WrethaOffGrid, if you don't already follow me or know me, here's a little bit about me, I am a 50+ year old grandmother, perhaps closer to 60 than 50 LOL... I am a Christian, conservative, though I tend to not push my religious and political leanings, you either believe or you don't, all I can do is be the light, enough about that.
I am a wife, mother, grandmother, sister, friend to many, close with a few, I'm a dog mama currently to 2 dogs. I'm an artist, photographer, cook, foodie, omnivore, health nut, I live 100% off grid, I love learning, I love nature (not a "tree hugger though), I love natural things, I also love technology.
When I first started hearing about AI, it was in sci-fi books and TV & movies, it was something to be feared, an inhuman, unfeeling, cold, impersonal, scary! It was something that seemed to be helpful at first, then it would slowly (or sometimes not so slowly) start acting in a way that is not best for the human race. Or it was something that the human race began to rely on and eventually couldn't survive without it at all, then there would be an incident that would cause the AI to fail thus rendering the human race incapable of surviving on their own.
So, in the last few years, as AI started working its way into the fringes of our lives, it's no wonder that so many feared what it stood for and what it could potentially become. I look at it as a tool, neither good or bad, just like any tool, this is something that can be USED for good, or evil, it's all in the person USING the tool.
Will it usher in the "end times" as is spoken of in the Bible and in other tomes? Well, I believe the answer is yes, I also believe we are living in "end times", AI and tech is definitely something that is going to be used, technology needs to be at a certain level in order for the things we have been told about end times to happen. Things like everyone being "numbered", digital currency because how else can "they" stop us from buying or selling?
The advent of 24/7 news on TV, when I grew up, the news came on basically 3 times a day, in the morning, after work around 5-6pm and at night, and then the 10 o'clock news. It was rare but if something very newsworthy happened between those times, your local news station MIGHT break in to tell you about it, but again that was rare. Heck, I even remember when TV stations went off the air at a certain time at night, our National Anthem would play, patriotic scenes would flash across the screen, then the screen would go dark or you would see "snow", if you grew up during that time, you know what I mean... There was no 24/7 TV, and you only had a few channels to choose from.
Then came cable TV and later satellite TV, and if you were paying to watch TV then there was no way these stations were going to shut down overnight, Very quickly came the news channels, that was an odd thing to me, how could there possibly be enough going on in the world to talk about 24 hours a day? I noticed that often news stations would repeat segments to keep the chatter going.
Another thing I remember growing up; generally, newscasters gave you the FACTS and allowed you to make up your own mind about the opinion you should form about said FACTS. We weren't told how we should think. There were opinion pieces, and they were clearly marked as opinions. Now days, as far as I'm concerned, it's 99% opinion and propaganda. I rarely watch the news, I haven't in many MANY years.
I came a little late to technology, I remember being in late elementary school going into Junior High school, it seemed like whatever grade I was going into, the grade I just left would get computers. I'm talking about the most minimal of computers, a big black CRT screen with green font, no graphics to speak of, everything was text base, anyone remember DOS? That was before Window's.
If you wanted to play a computer game or run a simple program, you had to buy or check out (from the library) a coding book, it had the games or programs written in it, in CODE, you had to manually copy (type) the code from the book into the computer, one line at a time. I still remember the logic codes "and/or/nor gates", it was this AND that, this OR that, and this NOR that, it also had a plethora of commas, semi-colons, colons, hashtags (though we called those a "pound sign" back in my day), if you mistyped one of the symbols wrong, then the entire program would break, and your game or whatever you were programming wouldn't work. We didn't have hard drives, we had floppy drives with the tiniest bit of memory. This was considered a "home" computer, before that computers took up entire rooms, and entire floors in offices.
Eventually computers became something everyone had, they were large, expensive and finicky! Delete the wrong bit of code and you had an expensive door stop. The internet arrived sometime later, although before the internet we had BBS's, Bulletin Board Systems, your computer basically called another computer through the phone line using a modem. You could talk (type) to another person's computer, one by one, mostly had chat lines though they weren't in real time, you read what other people wrote, and you would write something, you would then hang up and call back later to see who responded. everything was typed out, no voice anything, think "texting" but much slower.
A really big time BBS would have multiple phone lines at their house so that more than one person/computer could call in at the same time, those were a blast, you could talk/text in (almost) real time to other people, of course you never used your real name, you used a handle, a nick name. Some of the BBS's were pirate boards, nothing like "Arrrrh matey!", it was where you could download illegally copied computer programs, there were also "adult" BBS's where other things were traded, I tended to stay away from those. Some BBS's got raided by the police and the sys-op (the person running the BBS) could be arrested and charged. It was no joke. A smart sys-op had ways of quickly deleting or corrupting the data on their hard drives just in case of a raid, one way was to use software that with the click of a few buttons on the keyboard would do the deed, some had high powered electric magnets that they could wave near the hard drives. Anyone here used to be a sys-op?
Of course the internet came into being after that, I still remember the first time I got "online", I sat in front of my computer, staring at the welcome screen and wondered, what I was supposed to do now? I quickly figured it out and here I am now, writing to you.
Now AI is something that is in nearly everything we interact with, from our smart phones, our computers and browsers, some vehicles... it's in tech that we don't even know about yet. It didn't happen like the sci-fi books of yesterday described, we aren't using human shaped robots to clean our homes, yet... but it is in more and more of the things we use and interact with on a daily basis.
It was just this year when I really started digging into what AI is and what it can do for me. I, like many of my friends came in with a side-eye looking at AI, wondering if and when it would turn on us, destroying us or making us their slaves. Again, I think that has been blown way out of proportion, can it happen? Probably, will it happen? Hopefully not in my lifetime.
I am of the opinion that like all technology that has come into existence before me, AI and technology is here to stay, it's going to continue, whether or not I like it, or fear it, or ignore it, or refuse to use it. Nothing I do is going to stop that mighty train. So I choose to use it, I use it for good, I use it for education, I use it for entertainment, I use the TOOL that it is. Just like any other tool, it can be USED for good or evil, it's not the TOOL that is the problem, it's the intent of the person using the tool.
Unless you grew up in the generation before me, you might not know how people reacted to technology as it came out, it was said that automatic washing machines were the Devil's work, it would create lazy people with too much time on their hands, therefore making people more likely to do evil things. It was said that automobiles were bad, it was thought that people were incapable of going faster than 20 MPH (I could have that figure wrong, it could be even slower) without being physically harmed or even killed. When airplanes were being invented, people said "If we were meant to fly, God would have given us wings (meaning bird wings)... When computers were becoming a thing, it was thought that it would usher in evil as in the Beast spoken of in the Bible, and I believe that it's true, IMHO that was a necessary precursor to that happening. I also believe that what is written in the Bible, the prophecies, are going to happen; many HAVE happened already; I can't stop it, and neither can you. It's OK.
So here we are, with AI all around us, to me, it's just another tool, I am learning how to harness that tool, just like we humans harnessed fire, I'm using mine for good purposes.
I chose to create this blog to discuss my use of AI, how I am learning how to use it, my failures and successes, my hopes and frustrations pertaining to AI. I use several different AI apps, I actually pay to use ChatGPT, the rest of them I use the free versions. I am getting a pretty good grasp on how to craft prompts, whether it be for written words or graphics, I am having a good time with it.
Well, that's my story about how I got to here, if you are still reading, then bravo for you and happy dance for me.
What you will find here is how I am using and learning about AI, I'm using it in the two things I enjoy, word-smithing and graphics. I love writing, whether it is writing about my life off grid, crafting short stories and the such, I also love art, photography and creating graphics.
I have recently discovered that I can use ChatGPT to learn, I ask it questions about nearly anything, I have questioned it about the Bible, other books, I take pictures of the local plants, bugs, animal life and ask for IDs on these things. I ask it about health related subjects, things from diagnosing little health issues, asking about herbal and natural medicine, vitamins and supplements. I ask it about food, ingredients, I have even gotten it to create recipes for me, either something novel, or I tell it what is in my pantry and it gives me recipes to make from the ingredients I have on hand.
Graphics, I have had a lot of frustration as well as enjoyment out of creating images, I have discovered that ChatGPT isn't so good at graphics, though the paid level is better, it's still not very good. I prefer another site that specializes in just graphics. I have had to learn how to word my prompts to get the best out of them, and how to refine the prompts, I rarely get what I'm looking for on my first prompt, I look at the results and refine my prompts until I'm close to what I want.
One thing I've had to learn how to do is to let go of preconceived ideas, especially when it comes to graphics, until computers come out that can read our minds, it's sometimes difficult to get the picture in my head to translate to the words necessary for the AI to create what I'm thinking about. I'm getting better, and the AI's are also improving. It wasn't that long ago when I had to tell the AI to only add 4 legs to animals or 2 legs, 2 arms, and 5 fingers on human graphics. I still fight with ChatGPT about the style of graphics, for instance I recently wanted a simple line art, dry brush style, with black ink on white paper of a rooster head. ChatGPT kept creating graphics that looked like a lino-block cut print, I didn't want that style and kept telling it that, well we never could come to an agreement about what I wanted vs what it wanted to create. When I went to the other AI site, I used the exact same description and it spit out exactly what I was wanting.
This is definitely a work in progress, both for me and the AI bots who are "learning" too. I will show you what I'm working on, what I am doing with AI, some things I cannot discuss because they are related to the job I have, I signed a NDA and certain things I can't discuss, but if it's something I can share, I'll do it, I'll share the recipes I co-create with AI, oh and that's one word I like to use, is co-create, I am not writing or generating a graphic myself, not fully, but the AI isn't able to do it without my input, so I consider the results a co-creation.
I will share the ways I co-create graphics, I'll share the prompts and the results, I'll also share how I reword and revise my prompts to get better results. I'll also share the failures, the things that just don't work out for me, I welcome any advice you, my wonderful readers are willing to share with me.
I wrote this fully, without the help of any AI, though I have an AI spell checker, it also gives me grammar and punctuation suggestions, I allowed the spelling to be corrected but other than that, I wrote this all by my lonesome. I am very likely to use AI to assist me in the future in my writing here, I will do my best to let you know when I do that, especially if the bulk of what is written is AI generated.
This has gotten pretty long, probably more than I intended to write, that is one of my styles, I tend to be wordy. I know in this day and age, people aren't used to reading long posts, I hope to have something for everyone, wordy & verbose, as well as short & precise.
Thanks for being here, say HI below and let me know you are here.
Comments
Post a Comment