Lazy? No, AI.

Diane & Sunny, base image from Adobe Firefly

I used to drive my dad (and perhaps others) crazy because I was always trying to figure out how to do things faster…clean my room (yeah, sure), mow the lawn (a particularly loathsome chore), do homework (I just wouldn’t do it), washing the dishes (have to do my homework in my room), and more. He accused me of being lazy. Lazy!! Me?

I would argue with him about efficiency, time and motion, wasted creative opportunities, etc., etc…it didn’t make any difference. He called me lazy. And that is the label that’s stuck with me for more than 70 years. Perhaps I need counseling. Smile. Or maybe I am lazy.

Being the lazy gent that I am, I became intrigued with artificial intelligence (AI). I’ve written about the Three Laws of Robotics and I’ve enjoyed the luxury of my home robots…Roomba, Alexa, Siri. My TV works with voice. My sound system is keyed to my voice and so are other systems in the house. My doors and yards tell me when someone is close by and whether I know them or not. My car wants me to stay in my lane and maintain a certain space between me and the idiot ahead. And on and on. I’ve enjoyed all that, until now. Now my “creative space” is under attack. They’ve come for me.

I started playing with ChatGPT a short bit ago and was intrigued. And worried. How easy it is to create a story, an essay, a…well anything. Can students (and adults) get by just knowing how to manipulate the AI engine. Teachers will have to become AI detectives. Of course, images weren’t far behind the AI rush. I had not played with imagery AI until yesterday.

I logged onto Firefly. There is no learning curve, you just type something and an image is created. It was fun. The image above was from a sentence: nighttime corner of an old village with cobblestone streets. Poof. I had my image. I brought it into Photoshop, added Diane and Sunny, and I had invented a new world. All in less than 15 minutes.

How are we going to trust images, videos, or the written word anymore? If I weren’t so lazy, I’d figure it out.