Re: How I use AI (and it me)

Mere days ago, 82Mhz wrote how he uses AI. It sounded pretty much just like what I do. Privately, I don’t use it to do my thinking, but I will use it for help and correcting. I use LanguageTool to correct my English and even my Dutch spelling and keep me from using Americanisms when writing English. It is good, but it claims to be a “Free AI Grammar Checker”. It isn’t free, though, so perhaps it also doesn’t use AI.

Anyway, when DuckDuckGo’ing, I use the presented AI answers if they are what I was looking for. I often use DuckDuckGo Translate as well. People have tried to automate translation since the 1940s, but it simply can’t be done without a large body of examples put in a vector space.

What, after all, is AI but a fully intentionless general use of statistics from a massive collection of training data? I was reading about the dot com boom of the early 2000s. Apparently that is a bit of a mis-nomer and it should have been called the ISP bubble. When that popped, these ISPs left behind a high quality broadband network. If the AI bubble pops on April 14 next year, we'll have all these data centres that can be used for hospitals, schools and local governments to finally stop depending on American tech companies.

I also use AI on my phone. Not voluntarily, but for instance when selecting a word from the word predictor in my on-screen virtual keyboard. Text editing on phones is a horrible experience. Anything to make that more smooth is welcome. It’s also a small dedicated locally run AI, so the water and electricity usage won’t deprive entire cities of that.

I take personal notes, in my wiki, without the use of AI. Whenever I look up something online, I archive the answer on my Wiki. When I use it in my code, I add a comment in a way close to my original search, so I know I can find a working example next time I look for it. This not only causes me to use AI less, it also does wonders for my memory.

At work, I use AI when I’m told/expected to.