Replies

“The best bible version is the one you read.”

The best AI is the one of which you ask intelligent, pointed questions, without expecting it to do the heavy lifting of doing your thinking for you.

It is the one to which you pose queries which, like a traditionally structured story, have discreet “beginnings, middles and ends”.

First of all you have to have a task which you should be performing. Then you have to understand how not to let a computer lead you around by the nose. Then you have to pose challenges to it, chastise it when it hallucinates, and require it to acknowledge its mistakes and produce correct information.

I use the technical resource for technical things. When I want to challenge a heavy handed, large private group like an insurance company or a publicly regulated utility on its policies, I pose the question the most intelligently I can. I ask which are the legal provisions, which state agency regulates the particular industry, what are the problems, which are the exact provisions by law and the regulation names to make the large organizational tyrant do its duty, and which agency to appeal to once I have marshalled all my information. I lead the AI by pre-digesting consideration of improprieties. I expect the AI to respond with intelligent questions.

I do not treat it as the 8-Ball Game Toy, expecting it to tell me what to think.

I use it for computer work which I should be doing. I have a project of using music notation OCR to convert musical “dots on a page” to usable sound. I tried an inexpensive package, which didn’t perform properly. I described the specific, detailed problems with the cheap computer application program, expecting the AI to respond in intelligent detail.

I use a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) D.A.W., a digital audio workstation. Cheap, stock “instrument” sound settings come out cheesy sounding. I surveyed AI for which “VST patches” were good, economical and satisfactory. I received a response, I purchased 2 patches for about $225. It was like pulling teeth getting them to install and work through to putting a good sound on the result. After about a week of trying every accommodation to install the voices, I got a result, like a smooth, classical horn section, a portion of music titled “Ave Verum Corpus” by the early Baroque, French composer Marc Antoine Charpentier, at https://tinyurl.com/3cc9zaex

I need Photoshop to take scans and old sheet music publicly available, remove pits and scratches, and render a TIFF file that scans in music notation OCR with the best result. I asked the AI what steps should be taken in Photoshop. It gave a detailed series of steps, which I first performed manually. Then I consented to its suggestion that it prepare a script file, a kind of “macro” to perform the all steps on multiple pages “at the click of a button”. It supplied numerous scripts which my version of Photoshop rejected. After much trial and error, reporting the errors thrown, the AI finally issued me a single script that works well. It must have taken 10 tries over about 3 days, without my obsessing about the process.

It wants to charge me either $20 or $200 a month. By wandering off after my allotted time is used up on my free version, even taking about 5 days, I attained satisfactory results.

I wanted a survey of available studies to answer a discreet question: “What were the stages by which electronic popular music outsourced people’s once vigorous song culture to radio and talkies?” I received a coherent response that a reference librarian would have had to spend hours researching. I then drilled down into the single best book, and am quoting from it now:

“…the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their “audience”, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians…” . Jacques Attali – Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977)

I languished for years trying to focus on my intended area of study. I could not interest anyone qualified to give me direction. The robot did it in minutes. Now it is up to me to put the high quality information to productive use. Because I am doing it for myself and not trying to use AI to cut corners, I am able to defeat my old saying, “The computer’s real job is to make you feel stupid, because it can’t really do anything.” AI is my slave, not the reverse.