AI - My Toes in the Water

Over many months now, whenever I have had to check my writing and editing work, a very pleasant female robot voice reads it all back to me. My vision isn’t so good these days, so this process helps me catch a lot of mistakes.

Another robot answers questions. Mostly I ask her factual ones, like when something happened or who did what to whom in history. She has many other uses, for example, when some software I depend on changes something and I have to find out how to return it to its usual state. Instead of having to watch long how-to videos in which my issue may or may not be addressed, bot-girl instantly comes up with the fix. This also applies to problems with equipment like phones, computers, or TVs.

Then I discovered something else. To lay some groundwork here, I lived in another state 50 years ago and worked with a woman who became a good friend. Later, she moved away and then died unexpectedly at age 29. I had no pictures of her – in those days we all didn’t walk around with cameras in our pockets. Eventually, her mother sent me a very pixilated black-and-white photocopy of her daughter’s newspaper obituary, which included a badly washed-out headshot. Years passed and computer photo-editing tools became available, but even with those, t I could recover only about half of the picture. Then came AI, and I wondered if that might help. I gave it a try.

It worked – not instantly. I had to tell the robot things like, the eyebrows should be a little thicker, or the hair should come down to her chin on both sides. But after about half an hour at the most, I came up with a very passable version of my friend – not quite the same woman but pretty damn close. Then, I had to figure out how I felt about this, or SHOULD feel. Am I Dr. Frankenstein, or was it just an effort to revive a distant memory?

Then I started having other thoughts. Among the first was, somewhere, some giant data center is sucking water out of the ground and driving up someone’s utility bill so that I could do my thing.

This is how it all works now. We enjoy a new level of tech-based convenience. but at a cost we don’t see, because it’s not right in front of us. So -- can I use AI and be a data-center protester too? I want to say, stop it, do I REALLY have to deal with all these heavy moral questions right now?

Well, you know what I did next: I asked the AI lady, and she said my concerns were “understandable.” But what do YOU think? Any feedback would be welcome here, just as long as you’re human. Thank you!

 

Saint Dolly

 

Hold on a minute, I’m not being cynical about that. Following Dolly Parton’s passing, we have witnessed an incomparable outpouring of love, honor, and respect that most famous people are not afforded. Our daily concerns simply stopped, or at least took a back seat for a time, ranging from a few minutes to many hours, depending on our acquaintance with her life and career. It has reminded us of how few people have actually done that. Just think about someone who has brought an involuntary smile to your face when you hear their name. even in their death. For me, Robin Williams is another such name that comes to mind. You may have had similar feelings about him or others.

So, what was it about Dolly? To be completely honest, she was never my favorite country singer. I didn’t particularly like her voice. But hey, I have never sung one note to an audience  nor written a single bar of music. If you want to keep going with this, I have never created one job nor established a single charity - which gives you an idea of just how un-Dolly I am.

Now she was human and had quirks, foibles, and personal struggles, but she seemed to have attained an almost perfect balance of accomplishment, humility, and generosity, mixed with a somewhat self-deprecating sense of humor. While all performers must pay attention to their craft and how it impacts audiences, it seemed like she was always perfecting a gift to share from a pure heart. Clearly, she was a great businesswoman, providing much employment and boosting the economy in her part of Tennessee with the creation of the Dollywood theme park, and was about lifting up rather than tearing down. She was famously non-political but did stand up for what she felt was right when necessary.

You might conclude that I have fallen for an image. But she wasn’t really crafting one. Most of us probably didn’t know about the extent of her charitable giving until it came out this week in the media eulogies. By the way, you don’t have to be poor to be something of a saint.

Sometimes, it takes the death of someone like Dolly Parton not just to turn the spotlight on them but also to reacquaint us with people whose values we appreciate, again, almost involuntarily. We know them when we see them. And some stars shine especially brightly when the darkness outside is approaching its deepest.