Yep, it's true. My natural evolution to full nerd is well underway. How could this have happened? It seems like yesterday I was failing high school chemistry and picking a college major purely based on my hatred of science and math. Four years of Journalism school did not prepare me for this.
Yet, here I stand today, on the verge of becoming a full tech geek. Well, obviously, not really, as computer code might as well be Greek to me.
That was until...AI entered the chat.
Imagine a world in which your crazy ideas are just a few clicks away from creating something amazing, like the image below.
Making AI my bitch
Lots of things are scary. I live in one of the biggest cities in the country, and scary shit happens regularly. Bad people and crime are just part of the urban experience, but I don't let them prevent me from doing anything. Fuck that. I walk confidently, head on a swivel, always prepared.
Where am I going with this? AI is the same. Has the potential for danger, yes. Anything in the wrong hands has the potential for disaster, and AI is no exception.
Hopefully, the government will step up and put some much-needed guardrails in place to govern the Wild Wild West of AI. So, there is some potential for people using it for nefarious activities. It is already happening every day. It's good to be suspicious. But it also opens the door to so much that it's worth exploring.
I understand that there is an incredible diversity of thought on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Whenever AI is mentioned outside of work, I notice the reaction is fairly consistently negative. I'm sure we have all seen the videos from graduation ceremonies around the country when speakers bring up AI and get booed.
I get it; these kids are fearful of the jobs that will be replaced by AI. They should be; many entry-level jobs will be the first to go. I'm glad I'm not starting off again, as circumnavigating the changing job market will prove challenging to some.
My advice to everyone entering the job market is universally the same: embrace AI. Take a class, get a certification. Free options abound to learn these tools. It's not going anywhere, and those who tame it first will be many steps ahead of those who avoid it.
Or become a plumber, mechanic, or electrician in the city and make ridiculous money. AI will NOT be fixing clogged toilets anytime in the future.
How do I use AI?
At home, I use multiple AI tools for everything! I'm a curious person, as it turns out, and ChatGPT has actually timed me out a few times for excessive use. What do I ask? Everything! I even planned my last couple of vacations using AI (Portugal and New Zealand).
When one of my dogs (Freddie) got on the kitchen counter while I was away and ate 11 BRAN MUFFINS, I turned to ChatGPT for answers.
Below is my query. Obviously, I ignored all the suggested behavioral modifications (who has the time?) and went straight to the Amazon link for the deterrent; however, I noticed that at the bottom, there were some "special notes."
It says that while it might work for Bowie, Freddie is more energetic and might need additional training.
What the actual fuck? ChatGPT is calling my dogs by their names and seems to know their personalities. Not sure what was creepier. I immediately push my laptop away.
Then I remembered that about a year and a half ago, I asked ChatGPT to create images of my dogs, if they were human (I told you I was curious). So important lesson here: AI forgets nothing. So whatever you feed it, it retains and will possibly incorporate into future queries.
Scary? Perhaps, if you are using AI to find out how long it takes a decaying body to stop smelling or what type of poison to use to kill someone, you might want to rethink it. For most of us, however, it's somewhat harmless.
I use it extensively for work, juggling multiple AI tools. I have found quite a few other worker bees who are heavy users of AI to automate the most heinous corporate tasks. I have also found that it enables me to create the most amazing content, web page copy, ebook, blogs, white papers, etc., by leveraging content we (my company) already have.
Many of you probably don't get the jump-step this provides, so let's take a trip back in the time machine. No hot tub needed.
Early 1990s Penton Publishing:
To research a topic, we would go to a small room in the bowels of the building. There, a man who doesn't make eye contact but hums continuously, would type furiously into his word processor and generate a 5-foot-long printout scroll of NEXIS research (technical papers, articles, etc.) that I would have to take back to my office and weigh down with books to flatten enough for me to read, digest, and regurgitate into an article.
It was pre-Internet.
With AI, I simply upload the source documents and tell it what I want, how I want it to sound, and appeal to certain groups, in a particular tone of voice. It's like magic, or cheating for some of us who had to learn how to do all of this the hard/old way. To say it enables me to do more is the understatement of the century.
Tackling vibe coding
I was in Boston a few months ago for work. I work for a large software company, so I'm constantly surrounded by the smart, nerd pack. While there, I took part in a Vibe Coding session with a few coworkers. What is that? By definition, vibe coding is a way to develop software using natural language prompts to guide AI to generate, refine and debug code, rather than writing it line-by-line.
Translation: You can create pretty much anything now without knowing how to write code. This is a giant step, as I always have ideas of new apps to create, but the gap between the idea and the app was formidable. Now, you think of an app and within minutes, BOOM: you have an app.
In the session, they showed my coworkers and me how to do it and then gave us some time to vibe code on our own. After about 15 minutes, they asked us to show what we created. The guy next to me created an inventory management system. My other coworker had created an app to help companies better plan and manage production amid supply chain disruptions.
When the session leader asked what I created. I started off by saying I didn't realize I was in a class of suckups, before introducing my app, Vibe Check, that tells you what bands are playing in cities you are in that align with your musical tastes. Cool, right?
I have now built 6 apps for other very important things. One that allows you to virtually try on celebrity hairstyles and another that lets you create cool images of your dogs and yourself in myriad backgrounds, enchanting forests, beaches, etc., as cartoons, photorealistic, or watercolors, pencil sketches.
That's right. Barb is vibe coding her way to a better life for us all. Well, ok, perhaps I'm overstating that, but the bottom line is that AI is not going anywhere. It will only get more powerful, so don't sit on the sidelines for too long.
My advice is to pick it up and give it a try. Imagine you have a building full of encyclopedias (Google, if you're under the age of 40) and the answer to every question is within one of those thousands of books. Now you have a tool to gain those answers within seconds. Exciting, no?
Alright then, this is getting verbose, and I'm increasingly sounding more dweebish by the minute, so I will close and go play outside. My neighborhood fest, Midsommar, beckons.
I hope you all are enjoying the summer.
Until next time,
Barb "Vibe Coder" Schmitz
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