Left to my own devices

The Verge recently had an article about AI - specifically, how humans perceive AI. It's been a pretty big topic of late, what with ChatGPT and the Bing Chatbot on a roll, having millions of users help them learn and become better... er, I mean just toying around with it for a bit. And major companies expanding its reach by the day. The aforementioned piece from The   Verge  considers the "mirror test," wherein we are faced with something that is really ourselves, and the test is: do we recognize it as such, or do we believe it to be an altogether different entity? Animals and other creatures below us on the evolutionary chain have been faced with such a test before, with a literal mirror. Sometimes, they may perceive themselves in their reflection, other times they're confused, and sometimes they flat out believe their reflection to be another being. The author of the article believes too many people are falling into that last camp when it comes to AI.

I've been meaning to write about something, but life has been busy of late. So, a week later, I'm finally getting around to it. There was an article that caught my attention, about a guy who used AI -- specifically, ChatGPT (you can Google it, if you want to learn more) -- to write a children's book. He then used something called Midjourney to illustrate it. The person in question, Ammaar Reshi, "wrote" (quotations used purposefully) Alice and Sparkle  for a friend's daughter, and self-published it online via Amazon's digital bookstore. He also had a physical paperback version printed. I'm not sure what the intended recipient thought of the tome, but Reshi talked about his endeavor on Twitter, and the reaction there, and on Amazon, was apparently lackluster. Some criticized the writing, others criticized the use of AI-generated art, claiming it stole the work of actual artists.