I could see myself doing an insane deep dive into Artificial Intelligence: there’s no lack of writing on the topic, it’s constantly improving, and we’re gaining access to it casually more and more every day. But this is a cannabis blog, and this was meant to be a filler post this week, as I am (as is noted in the AI chat I’m linking below) in between anniversary bookends, with my own having been this past weekend, and my parents’ 50th this coming weekend (and I am doing most of the baking for that one) so I’m pretty busy and distracted this week. For which – again – I apologize.
But AI. If you want that deep dive, and completely disconnected from cannabis, I highly recommend Wait but Why’s 2-part post on AI.
I cannot recommend this site enough. Wait but Why’s explorations of mental health, perceptions of ourselves within our culture(s), and general explorations of those random weird thoughts and questions we all sometimes have are wonderfully accessible and fantastically illustrated in seemingly crude yet expressive MS Paint-style drawings. Even his writing about Elon Musk was before Elon started acting like a comic book super villain, and it’s still a very fascinating look into a tech entrepreneur who has undoubtedly had an impact on our lives.
As usual, I’ve already digressed from what was already a digression.
ChatGPT. When it first dropped, my immediate response – informed by formerly being an English teacher – was that this was the newest way high school and college students were going to cheat on research, opinion, and literary analysis essays. And lo and behold, that was one of the first big issues that was being addressed. I’m not using actual article titles, but I recall that many of them sounded like “Is this the End of High School Essays?” and “What can Teachers do to Stop AI-Written Papers?” I feel like they were all presented as questions. We weren’t sure at first. Within a week or so of ChatGPT making it big, there was an app that had been developed to determine if an essay was AI-written, an app that was constantly being updated to keep up with the machine learning of the AI it was combatting. AI was fighting AI. It was starting to feel like the most boring prequel in the Terminator franchise. The Term-Paper-enator, or something.
So I’ve been playing with these AI programs that are publicly accessible. I played around with DALL-E2 (which I assume is a play on WALL-E, the Pixar movie) to get ideas for the logo for this blog. I didn’t use any of them, but the weird shit it came up with helped me narrow down what I actually wanted. Ultimately, the logo I’m currently using was made by the dude at Alchemical Photography.
I’ve also had a few random chats with ChatGPT for fun. And I wanted to try the code-writing AI that’s also out there, but it’s not free, so I haven’t yet.
So I was considering AI, and feeling like I didn’t have as much to say this week due to various anniversaries. So I decided to ask ChatGPT if it had anything interesting to say, something that might inspire me. And I guess it did, since I’m writing about the experience. But it also did give me some avenues to explore in the area of cannabinoids, endocannabinoid receptors, and such. I’ve added those topics to my research list, and I’ll be diving into those later. But for now, I’m linking the chatlog, so you can see what I talked to ChatGPT about, and if you haven’t explored AI generating apps, it’s weird, and can be fun, and I recommend trying. Ask it about a topic you’d like to learn more about, or just start a conversation with it and see where it goes. Sometimes it feels like you’re just talking to a bunch of Google results, like when I was telling it about the GZA show I went to this past weekend, and it didn’t have anything interesting to say, though I was hoping it would at least mention other hip hop artists or other culturally relevant items, such that the conversation would have a natural flow to it, but alas, it didn’t. But, like I said, when telling it about my blog, I got to a place where it was offering information I didn’t already have, and now I’ve got some prompts to explore later.
I do fear that AI will disrupt or hurt certain industries. It already is, in fact. Artists are fighting back against AI-generated images, both because it is taking work from humans, but also because the machine learning requires input for the system to know what kind of thing it is supposed to replicate and synthesize, and those inputs are works of art produced by the very humans its images are putting out of work. And certain kinds of writing, like technical writers, are at risk. But if we ever want the future promised by Star Trek, we’ll have to allow for technology to replace tasks that we don’t want to have to perform for money, affording us the free time to explore pleasurable activities, like creating art. And we’re in a weird gray area right now. A lot of manufacturing jobs are automated, for instance, but people still need to work for money, and we need money to pay bills and feed ourselves, so right now machines replacing some jobs – even dangerous and laborious jobs – is seen as people losing jobs, not being given free time. Because it’s not universal. Yet. Anyway, here’s that chat. I hope you all find this interesting. Back to more immediately cannabis-related material soon.
*The Featured Image for this post was created on DALL-E2 with the prompt: “a 3d cgi image of a bearded man wearing glasses and a flat brimmed baseball hat, sitting at a computer looking tired at not being able to come up with anything to write about.” Those 4 individual images were the results.
Stoned Coast 
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