AI—Friend or Foe?

(image from pixabay)

There is much chatter in the writing community about the evils of AI. It is generally seen as the ultimate threat to creative originality and authentic publication of our work. Writers have to worry about plagiarism and having our work sucked into the great AI vacuum for its training purposes without any cited attribution or compensation. Graphic artists and photographers are being replaced by AI generated images, which robs them of their livelihood. It is hard to even tell what is real and what is fake.

The flipside of this are some of the great uses for AI, which I am gradually hearing about through my friends. One such friend was troubleshooting a problem with an electronic gadget in his home and he got AI to read the entire instruction manual and find the solution in about two minutes. This saved him hours of frustration and he was able to zero in on the problem and fix it quickly.

My daughter was recently comparison shopping online for some specific niche baby products and she used AI to enter the features she wanted and it instantly narrowed down the search from hundreds of options to only two models that met her needs. She is also saving time by using AI to help write her personal bios and curriculum vitaes for the art shows she enters.

As a retired teacher, I’m now hearing that my colleagues are saving hours of time preparing report cards using AI. While they can still tailor the comments to each individual, the program can instantly do things like listing curriculum requirements or age-specific behavior expectations and grade level performance standards. I am pleased they are finding ways to decrease their overwhelming workload.

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