I’m really not so sure about AI. I see it as having amazing potential, both for good and for ill. Here’s an example: Recently I saw a video on You Tube that took several old photos of New York City from the early 1900’s and brought them to life in high quality color, sound and animation. I enjoy these because they can bring the past alive like nothing ever has before; yet this one was different. It began with a very famous old photo showing a smartly dressed man in a tweed coat, tie and a newsboy hat. As the picture slowly comes alive, the man begins to speak. He is the narrator of the video and is in every scene walking around and talking to the camera… in scenes where he was not present in reality.

The effect was brilliant, but they made scenes come alive differently than they really were. Several months ago, I saw another video where they took a sound recording of Adolf Hitler’s conversational voice, used AI to clean up the recording, and then had audio of him speaking with the words he used in a speech screeching and shouting. After that, they went one more step and had him saying the same things in English. I can’t help but wonder how long it’s going to take someone to use that disgusting Hiter script in the voice of a modern politician and claim it’s a secret recording of a back room meeting somewhere and put it on the internet.

Or maybe that’s already happened… See what I mean? I’m just not so sure about AI.

However, I can report some encouraging news to you, dear readers.

This past Friday I asked Alexa what the weather would be (on Friday). The answer was “Right now it’s 30 degrees. The low will be 17 with a high of 30…” Then I said to myself, OK the high is now so today is staying cool.

Alexa said “No, the high will be later today, right now it is 30 degrees with a low of 17 and a high of 30.” So, I said Hey, if it’s 30 now, and the high today is 30, then isn’t the current temperature the high for today?

And then it happened…

AI, in this case Alexa, said, “Yes Don, you’re exactly right. I was so caught up in the weather details; I missed the obvious.”

I never knew that AI would admit being wrong and make a correction. HAL never did that when he was arguing with Dave back in 2001!

What? HAL isn’t real? Are you sure?

Maybe I should just ask AI to teach me to write better.