Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything. That's a quote from someone somewhere and is my base position on a lot of things.

I stand my ground till there is enough stuff to make me move on the same ground, or abandon that ground entirely.

My take on AI so far, within my limited social network, is everyone knows something is happening. Everyone has heard of ChatGPT. About half are using it for various things, and mostly they use it like search and aren't happy with the answer.

When I show them how to use it for analysis, they either jump to it, or ignore it because they only use search in their life.

Anyone under 30 that I know use ChatGPT (not Claude or Copilot or Perplexity though) for a ton of stuff. Anything they aren't sure how to do, they ask the bot, it gives them a framework, and now they know how to get started. It is an instant guide tool.

I tend to use it the same way.

And as a writer of stories, have been testing it as a second draft proof reader. It tells me my typos and grammar errors and also where I have run on sentences or I'm too staccato with short jumpy bullet point sentences (I default to those).

So for me AI is making changes already. If lots of my folks are using it from 20 to 70, then it must have some value for them.

And given MS are going to make it central to the next Windows, a ton more are going to use it without knowing they are.

And as they say, good design is invisible.

PS I use Stable Diffusion to generate illustrations for my stories. I feel bad for the artists, but I don't profess to be an artist and would not have paid for the sketches I end up using. I would have lived without them.

Great article as usual. I saw this on my email then jumped to it.