AI is tempting me
When Chat GPT was fresh, I used it a little bit. Tried it out. Wasn't thrilled by it. It just wasn't very helpful for me.
Later, I learned about the harmful things about AI & reflected on it more - job loss, energy consumption, water use & possibly pollution, theft of art, and probably other things. So I became a committed AI Hater.
But I've realized more things lately where I think AI would have been immensely helpful to me. Little programming tasks, just to make simple little tools for myself.
One idea is ... So, my state Department of Natural Resources has a webpage with a list of native plants, with their name & each name is a link to it's own page. The plant's own page has a picture and some details about growth height & stuff. There are no pictures or growth info on the list page. I wrote some software to collect this information into a grid, to view everything on one page, and it took about an hour.
It was kinda fun. But I could have done it in 10 minutes, maybe less, with an AI. It was a really simple script. And that probably would have used less power in-the-moment than running my laptop for all that time.
And yes, the training of that AI used a lot of power already. On one hand, I'm complicit if I use it. On the other hand, it's already trained (even though they continue training more more more), and my use or non-use of AI is likely not going to have any meaningful impact on the development of AI.
Governments are spending a lot of money on AI. It's being sold to businesses, to professionals, to amateurs, to everybody. And I just don't feel like my behavior here is having any meaningful impact on the outcome. So why make my life harder to stand on a completely useless principle?
... To feel better about myself? ...
huh. maybe.
...
But I refuse. I stand by being a hater. And so I refuse. But man, it is really tempting sometimes.
(The other idea is a Command Line Tool in which I can save commands. Example, I type clt new and it opens an editor to write a script. I save it, then the tool prompts me to ask what command to save it as. Now a script is saved, and I can do clt help to see a list of available commands. I can type clt command_name to run a saved script. And I can also add options to commands or group commands. Like clp stream start to change any settings and open all the software I'd use for streaming, and clt stream end to close everything.)