In The Lab

 I'm not sure why I didn't see it coming from a little further away. My wife was admiring a sentence from a recent blog of mine, and I took some prideful satisfaction in the knowledge that these were mere words that I selected out of many and purposefully strung them together. And they made sense, after a fashion. That is my aim, after all, on most days: To make sense. 

It was only a little more than a week ago that I was confronted with the wonders of ChatGPT. If you are unfamiliar, I can describe it pretty simply: It does what I do most days but it's a computer. A program. An app. An artificial intelligence that strings words and ideas and images together that in many ways simulate what writers and artists do. On demand. 

For free. 

That's because it's still in research mode, and a friend of mine asked this machine to make a story about Donald Trump eating so much that he exploded. The results were quite amusing and, because I sometimes write stories about Donald Trump, I figure I'm a pretty decent judge. 

Then a week passed, and it was in those idle moments when I start conjuring up what I might like to write about for this day's entry that it occurred to me that I could just as easily ask ChatGPT to belch out something clever while I finish that especially tricky level of Candy Crush. And no one would have to be the wiser. I just come up with a phrase or premise and push the On button. There's your three paragraphs comparing the Second Amendment to the Infield Fly Rule. I could even argue that the output was my creation because I went to all the trouble of coming up with the grist for the cyber-mill. And I had the presence of mind to push the Enter key. 

But that's not why I am here. I am here to cobble together those pithy bits of wisdom and fanciful bits of prose that hopefully fill that three minutes in your day when you're looking for what goes on in my head. Not what gets skimmed off the top of the murky pond we call Al Gore's Internet. It's not the real thing. It's CheatGPT. 

At least that's my take for now. I used to insist that I would only attend movies if they had a web site. Now I feel compelled to support those that don't have any web presence at all. I used to write everything on big yellow pads with a series of black Bic Stick pens. I used to look things up in the dictionary, or thesaurus. Now I use the tools at my disposal, just a click away. How many hops, skips and jumps am I away from churning these things out via Artificial Intelligence? 

Time will tell, but for now I have set myself a task that I must eventually rise to: Comparing and contrasting the Second Amendment and the Infield Fly Rule. 

Stay tuned.