As always, I find life confusing. Words change their meanings – we’re all used to ‘gay’, so that’s not a problem, and is it brave parents who call their son Dick. I had a lovely, intelligent but innocent friend who was writing a thriller with a hero called Richard – nothing wrong with that – but then he announced that the character’s nickname was Big Dick! It took me quite a long time to persuade him that this would turn his exciting tale of derring do into a comedy! For many years I signed emails off with the letters LOL – which at that time meant ‘lots of love’, but then Gen Z took over with their emojis and acronyms and it became Laughing Out Loud. When I was a child on a farm, AI meant Artificial Insemination and the A1 was the main road north but now we have Artificial Intelligence and there is no doubt it is taking over.
Google has been my friend for years, yet Google is not a friend, not like ChatGPT. Apparently, you can build yourself a virtual boyfriend that won’t scam you and will listen to your woes, but until you can find one that will take out the rubbish I think I’ll pass.
However, it is scary how much information machines have about us. This is useful when face recognition can pick out a sex pest before he boards a train and with any luck a real human will apprehend him before he exposes himself on the 3.15 to Exeter. Not so useful when they bombard you with ads for incontinence pads and funeral plans, items that will not raise the spirits on a dark and gloomy morning. On the other hand, there is a device for helping you put your socks on that looks quite appealing, and I have to confess that I have an extremely useful grabber that I got my husband when he had a new hip. It is very helpful for retrieving my glasses from under the sofa or tackling the shredded confetti that one of my Labradors likes to make of any tissue inadvertently left in a pocket. –
I no longer have a landline because the majority of calls I got were from ‘people’ trying to sell me something. ‘Hi, Is that Stella?’ the voice would ask but it was more and more difficult to tell whether I was talking to a real person or not. Presumably as things progress AI is going to put a lot of romance scammers out of work. In some far off countries there are whole buildings full of young men communicating with women persuading them that they are talking to a hunky looking American millionaire who is madly in love with them but inexplicably short of funds. I have read and watched a lot about this and the ‘men’ are pretty unbelievable and only succeed because they find someone at a particularly vulnerable time in their lives. As for financial scams – they are much more sophisticated and even financial experts have been taken in. All pretty frightening.
I’ve got a book called False Friends. It isn’t a novel about love and lies but a book on the French language. As anyone who speaks French knows there are many words ready to catch you out!. . AI will soon be able to create the perfect False Friend, one who knows you as well as you know yourself and will be able to trick you successfully. Although I’m not sure that AI will have a sense of humour. In romance scams the women love being told that their eyes are like deep Mediterranean pools and how wonderful they are. I like a compliment as much as anyone but nothing beats being made to laugh and I’m not convinced that AI is very witty. I have just asked ChatGPT to tell me a joke and this is what it came up with. Why did the AI break up with the calculator? Because it felt it was doing all the processing in the relationship. Excuse me while I split my sides!
As for cooking videos on Tik Tok there are a lot of American women (who might be robotic but are definitely real people) cooking on Tik Tok for their families, although judging by the quantities they must have enormous families – probably in both senses of the word. These recipes could only be improved by AI. Not a fresh ingredient in sight and mostly featuring a gigantic block of Velveeta (a plastic ersatz American cheese) and several cans of soup plus numerous other frozen or canned ingredients all mixed together to resemble a huge pile of sick! AI could only be better in choosing a recipe and doing the shopping list when it would not forget any vital ingredients. And on the topic of ingredients I read a good tip for cooking kale the other day, if you add some oil to the kale during cooking it will slip straight out of the pan and into the bin. I’m not a fan of kale!
Has Anyone Seen My Glasses? 