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Jill Swenson's avatar

I'm glad you liked Ruth Ozeki's novel. I still think about it.

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Naomi Yaeger's avatar

Diane,

As you know, anyone who uses spellcheck or a calculator has been using AI.

My nephew has built a career with AI. He works for Thompson Reuters in their technology research department. I don't fully understand what he does. But he talks about how much better doctors can diagnose symptoms. He traveled to San Franciso, where he won a contest in Generative AI Agents Developer Contest by NVIDIA and LangChain. He also posted on his LinkedIn how he took a class and was certified in Technoethics. On his About Me he says: "Philosophically, I view creating software as an art form similar to writing music or creating traditional art."

I totally agree with you. It's not the technology; it's the people using it and how they use it.

I do worry that if everyone uses AI to write, from students' papers to emails, it will homogenize how people talk and write.

Another thing AI can do is create an Excel graph for someone participating in a swim challenge. And help one figure out how many yards, feet, and miles one has swum. I know I could do this myself because I know how to create Excel graphs, and I know how to calculate feet, yards and miles. It will "show its work," so you can see how it arrived at its answer.

I wonder if the younger generations will be hurt by relying too much on AI. They used to tell kids you will not always have a pocket calculator available, but they were wrong. Nowadays, just about everybody has a calculator in the smartphone in their pocket. What if the technology to develop those calculators was considered stealing from the original mathematicians who figured out the formulas?

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