AI Counterpoint

 I have written a few posts in which I have mentioned AI, and my observations have been quite disparaging.

I feel thee need to note that I do see good uses for AI, and in fact use it myself. Here are a few examples:


Use-Case 1:

The week before my last trip to Europe, I asked Google Gemini to create a schedule for waking, sleeping, and mealtimes, to help me reduce the effects of Jet lag. Beginning with the next day it scheduled my wake, sleep and mealtimes to be 30 minutes earlier than the previous day. By travel day, I was already adjusted by four of the seven hours. Made the trip so much easier.

Now, I could have created that calendar myself - wouldn't have been that hard, but it was terribly convenient to have the AI do all the subtractions in less than 30 seconds.

I also asked it to create a workout program I could do in the hotel, an exercise (haha! punny!) which I loathe due to the decision fatigue it causes. It put together a nice, thirty minute program including a brief warm-up, a series of body weight exercises covering most of the main muscle groups, a modest cardio component, and a short cool-down and stretch.


Use-Case 2:

Recently I received a set of four quotes for an upcoming project. They were several pages each, with a lengthy list of line items in small, dense text. It would have taken me at least an hour or two to go through them line-by-line to tease out the differences between them.

Instead, I fed them to Copilot and requested a summary. 30 seconds later, I had a clear, concise, half-page summary showing me exactly what the differences were.

It also provided a brief explanation of what the best use-case for each one was. I didn't need those, but they were reasonably accurate, and I can see how they would have been helpful to a non-technical person.

Use-Case 3:

On a whim, I fed the transcript of meeting into Copilot and requested a summary. It pulled out highlights, open questions, and action items in an outline format. curiously, it caught a conversation point I have altogether missed during the meeting.

I will add a caveat to this one. I did this same thing a a week later, and at one point we had a fairly lengthy conversation about the pro's and cons or moving off of Microsoft windows and on to Linux in our environment...

Not a single reference to that conversation appeared in the summary...

Copilot is Microsoft's AI platform.

I'll let you do the math on that...

I've got one more, which is another mixed-bag, but It is a longer tale to tell, so I will save it for the next post.