AI - No getting away from it!

Artificial intelligence (AI), once thought of as science fiction, is surrounding us all more and more every day. The robots are taking over the asylum!

I am the first person (maybe) to advocate that we try and avoid AI whenever and wherever we can, especially if any of us are involved in writing activities like authorship, newspaper reporting or essay writing for school, college or even university. AI can be wrong with its/their information and there are websites that can actually tell, very accurately, whether or not the assignment or other written work that you try to put forward as your own creation is really written by AI. I know this as a true fact because, although I write my own articles, posts and books, I always run my work through a plagiarism checker before I publish anything I have written. Okay, that way of checking is not quite AI, but then I also run my written work through one or two AI-detection websites 'just in case'. Unsurprisingly, I have had a 100% hit rate that my work is unique (as expected) and has been written by a human, therefore removing all doubt that I have an automaton creating my work instead of me.

On the other hand, some AI services are good at producing really good graphics, as I found out when an image I was drawing and colouring just wouldn't come out right before I could scan it in to my computer to turn it into a sharper version. So, armed with my sketch and a description of what I wanted to achieve, I visited an AI website and allowed it to create what I was failing to do. The end result is the image shown on this page. Most of the time I do create my own images and they usually turn out okay. Yet, I now know that, I can call upon AI to help me out with them when I need a bit of independent inspiration - albeit as a last resort. 

But my writing has been, still is and always will be my own. Whenever time permits, I perform my own research (not using AI) and I type out my findings from the contemporaneous notes I have made, into the formatted style that you are now reading. However (and there is always a 'however'), sadly I have noticed that the likes of Google are transferring their enquiry responses over to AI, meaning that researchers like me can no longer ably trust the information I seek from such search engines - and the general man or woman in the street who uses the likes of Google can now potentially be misled by an inaccurately-programmed robot.

So, what is the solution to this dilemma? Speaking for myself, I still own plenty of reference books that I can use to swot up facts and figures from the past, many going back a century or so to times when AI wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye. As I see it, printed books from the pre-computer age will once more become the valuable resource they once were before we all decided to rely heavily on the 'information superhighway', a term that was once used to describe the internet and is a very rarely used description today. And, here's a funny thing, I absolutely hated History lessons at school; maybe that was due to the curricula that the teachers had to follow. But then, during the many years of my life, I got more and more interested in history - especially when I realised I am part of it when future generations come to learn of the 20th and 21st centuries.

I don't have a study full of bookshelves or bookcases. I am not that well organised or prosperous. But I do own plenty of reference books, probably enough to keep my thirst for historical information going for the rest of my time on the third rock from the Sun, with most of them tightly-fitting into spare cupboards or drawers or wherever there's a bit of space 'to take just one more'. The only downside to flicking through the pages of printed matter is that it is much slower than the internet. But, if it means that the information I am looking for is accurate and not written by robotic guesswork, I will gladly take the time to wade through all those pages until I uncover that hidden gem.

Try it yourself, look for and buy a reference or history book from the 1950s or 1960s or even the 1970s, from one of the many second hand book shops or even the numerous charity shops (thrift stores in the USA) and dive in! I guarantee you'll learn something new the first time you open the cover, even if it is just the author's name!

Trevor Mulligan