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!