I dwell on the promise of a new gardening season by compiling a list of plants and seeds I want to grow. I thought I had all the tools I needed this year, but AI jumped out in front of my wheelbarrow. I never saw it coming. My head began spinning. ChatGPT was to blame. Claude, Gemini, Grok, and others were lurking. The race from dumber than dirt to Super Intelligent AI is on.
FDA photo
My wife Rose complains that I’m suddenly talking to myself. I am busy directing verbal questions to ChatGPT. My “virtual personal assistant” is often right, though not always. I used the chatbot last fall to help me find out, for a Garden Rant story, where Samuel Constantine Rafinesque discovered the American smoketree along the palisades of Kentucky River. The bitch lied. It was not discovered by Rafinesque and has never been found growing wild in the state.
The Wall Street Journal hooked-up Claude to “run a snack operation in the WSJ newsroom.” AI ran the vending machines and lost a couple of hundred bucks. So much for cognitive superiority.
Baptisia ‘Lemon Meringue’ mid-May in Salvisa
Disciples of AI speak with God-like reverence for the extraordinary innovations to come. I feel I’m going nowhere fast with an overload of interesting, but mostly extraneous digital information. Scientific discoveries for me ended with Star Trek.
“Which new baptisias should I plant this year?” This was a head scratcher for ChatGPT, but, undaunted, she replied thirty seconds later, slower than usual, with a commendable list that might otherwise require a few phone calls to friends or a couple of hours poring through catalogs, while sitting beside the home hearth. What’s the rush? I’ve got ample firewood.
Odds are slim that AI will one day weed my garden
I love sowing seeds and dreaming of perfection, but there are always disappointments from recalcitrant germinators to damping off. There are no promises. Failure comes naturally. There’s nothing that AI can do. And that’s okay.
The bold promises of AI, and its potential for failure, worry me far more than my dying golden larch (Pseudolarix amablis). AI will produce great scientific breakthroughs and develop intelligence far greater than humans with a “conscious awareness”—for good or bad. Listen to the “Godfather of AI.”
To increase productivity, help find cancer cures— or research gorgeous new baptisias online—requires energy. Lots of it! Hyperscale data centers are popping up as fast as Dollar Stores. They require energy demands, according to a recent New Yorker article, “…perhaps bigger, by an order of magnitude than anything we’ve connected to the grid before.”
A healthy in-person community is becoming a lonely victim to isolation and learning algorithms.
Be good to your family, neighbors and friends.
Your garden will inch along a lot slower than a nanosecond, but just fine without a chatbot.
Amen Allen. Beautifully put — esp. “A healthy in-person community is becoming a lonely victim to isolation and learning algorithms”.
The bitch lied to me too. Thrice. And convincing lies too — not your run of the mill, see-through-them-yeah-that’s-the-ticket lies. Lies with citations (page numbers!) to newer editions of books I didn’t have and couldn’t easily check. Very disconcerting. Get it to alphabetize your lists, but don’t trust it with facts. Besides, the more lies told, the more lies are scraped by AI and re-told. Damn we are fuscroomed. (there are three words there — I’ll let you work out which ones they are 🙂 ) –MW
Quite possible those books it referenced don’t even exist. I’ve heard now of AI making up its sources.
Wonderful!
“Get it to alphabetize your lists, but don’t trust it with facts.” -MW
I mentioned to my flowers that AI is coming. Like the flowers in Through the Looking Glass, they were appalled, threw up their leaves in distress, shed their blooms, screamed, and died.
Sally, heaven forbid…
I’m far to concerned about the amount of energy and water it takes to use ChatGPT. I recommend you read more about it because it truly is alarming.
Ev, you’re absolutely right. There is a link in the story, to a detailed New Yorker article, that outlines the substantial energy and water requirements.
The simple way to outwit Ai is as follows: type in what you want to research THEN leave a space, add the minus sign, and then ai Click enter. None of the replies will have AI input.
I hope AI doesn’t know that!
Letitia, AI may know it now.
Nothing made by people could ever be perfect. AI may end up causing more environmental damage than the combustion engine, which reminds me that the idea of getting in an AI-driven automobile terrifies me. I do like that AI can name that song when offered just a snippet of the lyrics.
Jenny, I’m useless on Name That Tune. ChatGPT won’t make me any smarter.