The robots are here, and they're the wrong robots. The Jetsons promised us flying cars, Star Trek promised us cool space travel and intergalactic pals, and even Blade Runner promised us neat architecture. What did we get? A text box that wants to write a book for me.
I cannot state emphatically enough how much I don't want the robots to write a book for me. I want the robots to do all the boring, monotonous drudgery that I hate, not the fun thing I like. I love writing! Writing is what I WANT to be doing! Why on earth would I let the robot do the writing?!
Also, if all these weird marketing emails I keep getting are any indication, the robots aren't very good at writing. But since I'm a patient, supportive human overlord, I've come up with some things I think AI would be really good at.
Making this stupid vet appointment for me.
As a millennial, I hate phone calls. I'm considerably less good at mouth-words (talking) than hand-words (writing) to begin with, and as someone who's kind of easily flustered and has pretty bad audio processing, phones are terrible. I can barely hear the person half the time, the sound is weird, and when I get nervous I make stupid jokes, but if I can't see the person I can't even tell if my stupid jokes are landing. I dread phone calls, so I put them off for way too long, and then when I finally call to make an appointment I swear I can feel the receptionist at the vet's office judging me through the phone because Zelda was supposed to have her thyroid checked two weeks ago already.
(Zelda's thyroid is under control and she's her usual grumpy, hissy, lurky self; please do not worry about my favorite cat-shaped cryptid. She is thriving. And lurking.)
You know what would be great at phone calls? AI. It seems like it would be reasonably easy to get them to do appointment-phone-call level small talk, and then all they have to do is give out some info and know your schedule. If I were a receptionist, I'd probably prefer AI to some woman who's going to say, "What?" twenty times and then make "Neuter? I barely even know 'er!" jokes that don't really make sense.
Name minor book characters.
Here's a terrible secret about my creativity and writing process: I'm awful at naming characters. Total garbage at it. I'll be writing along, and then I'll suddenly need a name for an incredibly minor character who get mentioned off-hand or who has one line or something, and everything slams to a stop because I've never heard a name even once in my life. There are name generators and millions of lists online, but I also have to find the right name because I can't go naming the fifty-something no-nonsense office manager Ryleigh, you know?
(I also know tons of authors just skip the name and fill in it later, but I've never been able to do that. I need a name or I can't go on.)
This is actually the only thing I've ever tried ChatGPT for, and I'm sad to say it was a total disappointment. I was hoping I'd be able to write "please give me the name of a man in his mid-thirties who has a desk job and frequently wears khakis but was on a competitive hackey sack team in college" and it would spit out "Keith Frehold," but ChatGPT did not pick up on the vibe at all. At one point I think it wanted me to name a three-year-old Bob. Bob!
I don't even want AI to name anyone who's important to a story, because spending the hours to come up with Charlie or Gideon is probably important to my process, or something. I just want it to name the guy someone used to work with who always wore the same tie-dye shirt on Casual Fridays.
Figure out what food I'm supposed to be putting into my human body all week.
Has anyone else noticed that we're supposed to be eating every single day? Multiple times? And we're supposed to be eating different things so we get all these nutrients and whatnot? And often we have other humans who we live with and we're supposed to make sure that they're also eating all these foods and nutrients?!
I love food, and I like cooking, but if AI could do the thinking parts of this particular task for me that would be spectacular.
Menu planning seems like something an algorithm would be good at, right? There would be a complicated part where it looks into your fridge/pantry/cabinets and figures out what you've already got and what you should use before it goes bad, but then matching those to a bunch of recipes and also calculating what ingredients you could use multiple times over the course of a week seems like a perfect fit for a computer.
It would probably come up with some real weird stuff at first, but the point of AI is that it's trainable; tell it that banana-mayonnaise salad isn't a thing a few times and it'll start figuring it out. Once you trust it enough, it could even put in grocery orders for you! Never run out of coffee beans again!
In conclusion: no to AI writing books, yes to AI figuring out dinner this week.
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