The Curse of Writing with AI

A man-like figure made of clay cogs thinks deeply, representing AI.

As an early adopter of ChatGPT, I’ve used the AI tool considerably. In the beginning it was fantastic to have something who could be anything you told it to be – a copywriter, a top-notch marketing executive, it could even adopt personas and tell you how a given audience would feel about a particular blog post. The excitement at having a virtual editing team at your disposal was giddying. This was something out of my league that was suddenly in reach. It was hard not to see how this would change the world. In many ways it was like digital clay being sculpted into whatever desire or need you had – often not perfect but, in most cases, good enough. However, just like the old myths about clay figures brought to life to serve their masters, there would be a catch – one that would ultimately cause me to pause writing for a year.
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Using ChatGPT to Chase Your Dreams and Goals

For a long time, I’ve been interested in continually fostering a growth mindset. It’s a powerful belief that you can change your situation in life; that you aren’t fixed in terms of what life gives you. Instead, you can change it, learn new skills, and make your life dramatically better! Compare this to a fixed mindset where you believe that you are handed your lot in life and nothing you do will change it. That trying to improve yourself is some acknowledgement that you are not enough.

Recently I’ve been exploring ways in which ChatGPT can amplify some of the various self-help techniques I’ve picked up along the way to building a growth mindset… Techniques that have the potential to radically change your life.
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Wrangling AI: How I Turned ChatGPT into My Creative Sidekick for Garden Design

My Cottage style garden with Mediterranean influence - Lavender, and various grasses are in the foreground.

“Are you crazy, nobody uses ChatGPT like that, you know that right?” Mark said as we sat in the pub. I took a sip of cold crisp beer, slightly puzzled. I thought about how I’d been using generative AI to change my life recently. How I had used it to build a zen-like focus-point around a huge Japanese Acer in my garden. “Surely everyone uses it like that, isn’t it obvious?” I said, feeling slightly self-conscious. I hesitated. Should I tell him how I had also spent all evening talking to ChatGPT coming up with ideas for a cottage garden? It had factored in thousands of different plants that would make even Monty Don drop his trowel in surprise. That was when it struck me that most people use ChatGPT like Google. They punch in a prompt pieced together from some cheat sheet they found on social media and watch it spew out information like a hot bubbling volcano of knowledge, before copying and pasting the answer and never to give it a second thought. For me, this was a bit like using an expensive Macbook Pro laptop as a tea tray. Sure, it works and it’s useful to some degree, but there is so much untapped power in this method of computing, and by method, I mean “conversational intelligence” computing.

Steve Jobs famously once compared the computer to a bicycle for the mind — for its efficiency in propelling humans to where they wanted to go. I would be so bold as to say, extending this analogy… That AI is a motorcycle for the mind.

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AI Thoughts: Computer Vision, ChatGPT and Captain Kirk

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a compelling lecture on computer vision at The Royal Society in London. Professor Andrew Zisserman showcased an innovative approach to building models, much like how a child learns – by cross-referencing visual, audio, and text data. However that is an oversimplified summary, the actual process can broadly be summed up into 3 steps and really got me thinking deeply about AI and some of the issues the lecture uncovered.
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