This past month or so has been really exciting for me. Among other things, one of the most exciting has definitely been my dabbling with (and then diving head first) into Generative AI (GenAI), or more specifically Large Language Models (or LLMs, which you may know as “ChatGPT” or “Gemini“).
I’ve been avoiding GenAI for a while now. Always thought it was too hyped and just a fad. Surely it was nothing different from what we had before? And I took up “Machine Learning” (of which LLMs were a subset(?)) in university so I should know.
But I was wrong.
Yes, GenAI is hyped, and almost certainly overhyped. Many who write about it don’t necessarily understand it, or what they understand comes from what everyone else and their brother-in-law is saying.
They think GenAI means robots will take away jobs (maybe, but more likely change the nature of them); become sentient (maybe, but not that soon); and that they’ll herald world peace (no) or the apocalypse (no maybe).
And yet at the same time, it’s also almost certainly not hyped enough.
I see GenAI as a new literacy.
Where we saw the advent of data-literacy in the 2010s — in almost any white-collar professional job, and increasingly even blue-collar ones, you’ll need to know your way around a spreadsheet — the next few years will likely herald the advent of AI-literacy, where soon anyone who doesn’t know their way around a GenAI tool will be significantly left behind.
(Just a thought experiment: I could imagine plumbers putting in “symptoms” of a bathroom incident and getting credible solutions from ChatGPT/Gemini, including the quickest, fastest and cheapest options, outperforming and outlasting(!) the ones who just do what they always did without that help.
And with homes increasingly “smart” and harder to repair, the aid of technology may go from nice-to-have to necessity.)
If you haven’t jumped onto the hype train yet, don’t. You don’t have to.
Just gradually pick it up, and almost by magic, you’ll find yourself sucked into the GenAI world.
I started small, and with some of the silliest use cases:
- “hey ChatGPT, I asked the I Ching about my job and I got the hexagram X, what does that mean?”
- “hey Gemini, I picked three Tarot cards today when asking about my family, and they are X, Y, Z; what does that mean?”
And then moved on to more practical ones:
- “hey ChatGPT, my phone can’t call out but it can receive calls, what’s the issue?”
- “hey Gemini, my wifi always stops working after I close the lid of my laptop, what’s up?”
And then strategic ones:
- “hey ChatGPT, I received the following Slack message today. I can make no sense of it, and suspect it’s got to do with the problem being a wicked problem. What’s the best way to approach this, and how should I respond? I want to be polite yet firm.”
- “hey Gemini, PO (provocation operation): my job is made obsolete by AI.”
I found that the best way to learn was just using it.
The more you use it, the more you get an intuitive sense of how it should be used.
A caveat and warning though: as great as it is, GenAI isn’t always right.
It “hallucinates” and makes things up, all the while sounding extremely confident. It’s not always easy to tell but, the more you use it the better you get at identifying when that happens.
Like what the vice-principal of my school told us students, “read all the books you can, but don’t believe everything you see. Always question. Take in what is useful, and discard the rest.”
See you on the GenAI train.
Donn, fragments 
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