“I’m a high-tech, redneck. Mayberry meets Star Trek.” George Jones.
Actually, I am about the furthest thing from high tech. Now that my daughter has left the nest, I find myself helpless whenever I am instructed by a “help line” to open up their “app.”
My iPhone is at least seven years old and I am fairly certain that my wife bought it used, or “reconditioned.” It was only a couple of years ago that I discovered that my phone did other things than just place phone calls.
The new thing in the tech world is artificial intelligence, or AI, which makes me wonder, why do we suddenly want AI, isn’t good old fashioned human ingenuity and know-how enough? Do we really need a machine that thinks for us?
Several years ago, I sat in on a journalism class at Augusta University and one of the first questions I was asked was if I used “Grammarly.”
While I didn’t say it out loud, I thought to myself, isn’t that cheating?
I’m sure that someone who struggles writing a resume might need assistance, but for a professional writer, a computer program that literally does the work for you is intellectual fraud, in my opinion.
For all of technology’s advances, sometimes the results of this “superior computer reasoning” are not that impressive.
In fact, AI has apparently now taken over the news feeds that flash on the computer throughout the day. I am told that the computer uses algorithms based on a user’s search history to select stories that are a custom fit to what interests the user.
So, why then, does my computer think I want to know about Taylor Swift and her boyfriend of the month, some singer named Katy Perry and, is it, princess or duchess this week, Meghan Markle?
Actually, I will plead guilty to occasionally clicking on stories about this American grifter, Markle, whose shameless self promotion is almost impossible not to look at, much like a head-on collision of clown cars escaping the circus.
My computer has a crawler at the bottom of the screen that purports to inform me of the weather conditions outside. However, more often than not, the crawler tells me that the skies outside are sun filled, when I can look out the window and tell that it is storming.
I am also learning that this highly touted AI has a lot to learn. Sure, Grammarly will take your thoughts and spit out a professional looking story, but I can tell the difference.
The writing, in my opinion, is stilted and almost sanitary in its wording. Now, I am told that more and more items posted on the internet as “news” are actually AI generated pieces and they turn out to be about as accurate as my computer’s weather observations.
According to my computer’s AI chat bot, 60% of news stories globally are now written by AI. The computer cited it source as “Pearl Lemon.” I don’t know who that is, Pearl Lemon may be another AI chat bot for all I know.
If that percentage is true, then it was bad enough that we have to deal with almost all of the legacy media making up stories out of whole cloth, now the computers are getting into the action.
In 1984, the movie “Terminator” warned us about computers taking over the planet, and now that movie seems to be coming true before our very eyes.
No thank you, I am happy to be left out in the latest wave of technology. I rest well at night knowing that should a zombie apocalypse occur, I can just go back to using my trusty typewriter without skipping a beat.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter, Editorial Page Editor and weekly columnist for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
