Alarice's Authentic Journeys

I recently had a conversation with my mother on the topic of generative AI. Yes, you read that correctly. However, the interaction went more like this:

“Hey Al, what is this Meta AL? Why is it interfering with my posting?

“Oh, well, Facebook is now called Meta and it’s Meta AI not “AL.” It’s the new thing called generative AI, where basically it’s suggesting potential comments for you to write.”

“Well, I don’t need any help writing my own comments. It’s getting in the way.”

“If you don’t like the suggestions, you don’t have to use them. Think of them as thought starters.”

She breathed a sign of relief knowing she could now ignore the suggestions.

This conversation got me thinking. Augmented intelligence has become pervasive in our way of interacting with digital platforms. Is it helping us or taking away our mental capacity for constructing our own thoughts and perspectives?

I use generative AI in my daily life now, but not in every interaction. In every instance, I modify what it provides, but it definitely gives me a head start. If you are nervous about engaging with generative AI platforms, I encourage you to jump in. Try it and play around with it. Below are some examples of ways I have used AI in my daily life.

1. Idea Generation: It is helpful as a thought starter when trying to generate ideas about a particular topic. After I have written something, it can be helpful to analyze tone, sentiment, and better ways to phrase something for greater impact and understanding.
2. Templates and Scripts: Another way I used AI was to help me create a workout regiment. When setting up the prompt, I shared what routines I liked (e.g. Pilates, running, weight lifting), how many days off I needed. Then, in seconds it gave me a pretty good template to work with.
3. Learning and Research: Have you Goggled anything lately? Well, you will notice that Google Gemini automatically gives you “AI Overview” at the top of your search. This really makes the research quick and easy. You can’t always just go with what it says. I like to dig deeper and look for other points of view and research. But this does save me time from the page scrolling.
4. Design and Creativity: I have played around with some different Gen AI platforms to create some custom illustrations and graphics. Some of the images are really very artful and realistic. While generative AI has progressed, there is still room for improvement.

Will it replace our capacity to think and do things for ourselves? It will for some who don’t question or read what has been written. Sometimes it doesn’t always get intent or meaning correct, but that has more to do with our own prompts. You need to be a decent prompt engineer to come up with the guidance that you want the generative AI tool to take in constructing the language, speech, image or code. This also just takes practice. You tune the prompts to get closer to what you want.

In business, it can be extremely helpful for content creators, developers writing code, researchers and many more other examples. I have seen it accelerate the time to development exponentially.

What is your perspective? Is generative AI helpful in your daily life? How has it helped you?