Artificial intelligence is so handy, Wally’s column practically wrote itself
As I was sitting around the other day, procrastinating about writing this column, it occurred to me that if I just got busy I could knock one out in an hour or so.
After a few more games of solitaire, a snack and a look at the news headlines I just opened a new file and looked at it, hoping it would write itself.
Amazingly it did.
Above the space for the heading on the new blank page, the computer offered to write it for me using artificial intelligence. (Reserve space here for lame joke about how my intelligence has always been artificial, or is it fake.)
It even offered me subjects – a variety of subjects. There was creating a math quiz for fifth graders, creating an outline for a resume and creating a guide for interviewing a candidate for a software engineer intern position with Microsoft.
None of those seemed particularly relevant so I wrote “write a humor column” in the space and pressed Enter.
I watched, amazed, as a humor column rolled onto my screen. Eleven hundred words, with subtitles, which was a little more than I could use. It was about procrastination.
Eerie. How did it know that was what I had been doing?
What a moral dilemma. Should I use it? Actually, I have written about procrastination many times in my career. Write what you know, they say. Anyway, the column had some funny lines, including quite a few I had used before.
I have read about this, but until now I hadn’t seen it in action, at least as far as I know. I had been going to write about my outrage at the weird ways so many words are spelled.
“Queue,” for instance. That’s just one letter with four others tagged on for no reason. Or I was going to recommend replacing “ph” with “f”, like the letters sound in “phony.” It would make sense and save us printer ink by not having to print so many letters. It also might make phonics easier.
But when you start taking the k off the front of “know” and leave off the useless w, how would you “no” if you mean being informed or refusal.
To add further insult, every time I had a typo, the computer offered me the chance to rewrite that section with AI.
So, instead of a smooth, computer-generated column you got this. You probably will be able to tell by the mistakes that always seem to creep into my stuff.
But then again, maybe you wouldn’t know the difference. In tiny letters at the bottom of the screen, the computer warned me “AI generated content may be incorrect.”
Faster? Yes. Easier? Yes. Better? Not necessarily.
