Hypocrisy?

Another lovely sunny day, warm and meeting all the criteria for summer!  Bit of a breeze to reduce the heat, fairly low humidity and deep blue skies!  Another shot from yesterday’s air show, just because 😏 The little dog thought that the heat was a bit much to stay out too long, and has been drinking lots of water between throwing his ball at us and trying to steal cherries from me!  (He’s not getting any.) Don is in fairly good shape today, although he complained about the heat.  It’s one of those days where it’s fine for him to do a few light things, but he’ll be overwhelmed if he tries to do too much.

So… I had my follow up appointment with my doctor today.  This is my first since I got out of hospital, so we checked my blood (definitely improved over my last visit!) and my weight (😡 down another 2lbs in under a week!) and my vitals (all within normal range) so mostly good news.  We will be resuming chemotherapy next week, and aiming for me to be able to travel at the end of August to spend some time with my sister and the little ones.  We agree that I need more calories and my doctor recommends “eat butter.  Drink cream.”  We laughed at that, and I said that I will need to be eating the stuff my grandmother ate at my age, and not the “light, heart healthy” versions that we are feeding our kids! So I picked up some  cream and extra butter on the way home… AND a cream-filled cake 😈

So I’m feeling like a bit of a hypocrite.  Many years ago, when I was a young computer science student, I was enthusiastic about the idea of increasing the use of computers and the internet to be able to include as many people as possible in society.  As a teen/early 20s, I volunteered with deaf adults, children with developmental disabilities and some blind people, and I could envision that having technology would make it possible for them to fully engage in society.  At the time, blind children were trained to make baskets and do raffia-work; deaf adults were mostly trained in unskilled, manual jobs and those with developmental disabilities were mainly overlooked and were destined for institutions.  The idea of independence was remote, to say the least.  Thankfully, things have changed, and I’m able to video chat with my deaf friends, where we can sign to each other and have long conversations; the kids are now taught both office skills and entrepreneurship, and the blind students have more accommodations.  I love it.  That being said, though, I’m hating a lot of the AI applications that should be benefiting us.

I’m finding online more and more AI-generated stories, art and music, and I hate them.  I’m told, “Oh, the systems are still learning, they’ll get better” but I don’t actually want them to.  Not in those areas.  My little Luddite self wants to see actual human creativity at work, where people have shared their ideas, music and art.  The problem, to me, is that by using sampling to produce this output, it creates monotonous, uniform and uninteresting content.  I can read a story and know quickly that it was AI generated because of the use of stock plots and language.  AI images are all overly idealistic and “clean” so there’s no evidence of life in them, even if it’s supposed to be a portrait or a sports scene.  “Oh, just use it to generate an outline, and then fill in the details…” but why?  Or “just use it for repetitive text and reports” — which should not include professional reports, university/school assignments or anything that should have human input.  I’m also annoyed by chat bots, which just go in circles and don’t solve anything and voice-recognition systems on telephone calls.  

I’m happy that there are these technologies that make it possible for us to communicate more and to connect, but not so thrilled at the suborning of creativity and innovation.  No, AI doesn’t create anything, it doesn’t encourage creativity, it just patches together bits and pieces.  As one meme put it, I’d prefer that AI took over repetitive tasks like laundry, folding, cleaning, dishwashing, bed making, etc, rather than trying to replace human creatives with generic products.  Does that make me hypocritical?

I’m going to try to find something for dinner… I wanted to make some bread, but it’ll have to wait until maybe tomorrow.  Meanwhile, I’ll munch on something else.  Have a good night!