5 Things You Should Know Before You Use AI

It’s time to face facts: AI is here, and it’s going to change everything. From pizza delivery services to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence is getting the world ready for a future where machines do most of the work while humans are just along for the ride. While that might sound scary at first (and it should), it’s also exciting! We’re living in a future filled with incredible new technology like this, which means we all need to be prepared for what comes next. To make sure you’re ready for any possible situation that involves AI technology—from ordering doughnuts online or calling an Uber—here are five things you should know about artificial intelligence when it comes into play in your life:

Speaking to a machine is surprisingly easy

Once you’ve gotten past the initial shock of talking to a machine, it’s pretty easy. You can ask it to do things for you and it will respond in kind. And when you talk to it, it actually understands what you’re saying!

Try asking your AI assistant something simple like “What is the weather today?” or “What’s the best way to get from point A to point B?” It will give you detailed answers with maps and images and all kinds of useful information about where there are good places for lunch along your route. Or maybe all of this sounds too complicated; perhaps instead just ask how old someone is. The possibilities are endless!

AI is not good at context or nuance

AI is not good at understanding context or nuance. It’s a machine, and its job is to hit the right buttons in your app or website to get the desired result. But you know that sometimes people don’t actually want the thing they say they want. Humans know that sometimes people use language as a way of expressing emotion and tone. We as humans also know that sometimes people are joking or teasing. Machines don’t get that, at least not yet.

Let’s use an example: if someone says, “I’m hungry,” it could mean one of several things. They’re really hungry; they’re bored; they’ve just eaten lunch and need a snack before dinner; the thought of food makes them feel sick because their body isn’t getting enough nutrients from what little food there is available… The point is, it can take some mental effort for us humans to interpret what another person means by their words based on a combination of their facial expressions and body language along with other contextual clues like whether or not we just had lunch ourselves (and therefore might be feeling similar hunger pangs).

Don’t try to teach it with your own ideas

• Don’t try to teach it with your own ideas.

Executives and managers tend to try to teach the AI their own way of doing something. For example, if they want an AI assistant that can do research, they might explain what they mean by “research” and use their own examples of how to perform research. This is not only unnecessary but also counterproductive: The technology is designed to learn on its own and will be more effective when left alone.

It’s addictive.

Don’t get too excited about the results, don’t get frustrated if it doesn’t work as you expect, and don’t expect it to be perfect.

AI can seem like a magic box that just spits out insights into your data—and that’s exactly what makes it so addictive. You’re going to start seeing results almost immediately after you turn on your AI platform, which can make you feel like all of your problems are solved! However, there are some important things to keep in mind before getting too excited about the results:

• Don’t get carried away with the results: As tempting as it may be to run with what looks like a good idea from an AI model, keep in mind that this is still only one possible interpretation of your data. Always consult multiple sources when making decisions based on data analysis (including human experts). And always validate any recommendations generated by an algorithm with actual users or customers!
• Don’t expect perfection: In fact, expect imperfection—this isn’t a perfect world we live in yet! Be aware that even though AI software has no feelings or opinions (at least not yet), its algorithms do not know everything either. They may make mistakes; they may misinterpret information; they may misinterpret each other! Make sure there is room for error-checking before relying solely on these systems for decision-making processes.

It’s all about the data.

• It’s all about the data.
• You need a lot of it, and it has to be good.
• If you want answers to questions, you can’t just ask any old question—you have to specify which data you want your AI to use as input for its answer. This is called a “feature,” in machine learning parlance. The more features your system has, the better it can learn patterns in your data and make predictions based on those patterns—but only if they’re relevant! So if you have an AI that’s supposed to detect fraud or predict product sales or something else along these lines, don’t just throw everything at it and hope for the best; make sure your algorithms are looking at the right stuff first by asking yourself what questions they’re trying answer (and where).

Artificial intelligence has real benefits for some tasks, but don’t expect it to fully replace a human yet.

If you’re new to artificial intelligence and are thinking that it could solve your problems, think again. AI is good at some tasks but not others, so don’t expect it to fully replace you yet.

As an example: The best way to use artificial intelligence is as a tool to help you solve problems. It’s important to know what AI tools can and cannot do when they’re being used by humans.

The most basic thing AI can do is take data you put into a machine-learning algorithm and make predictions based on that data—for example, predicting what products someone will buy based on what other people like them have bought in the past (this is called unsupervised learning). This kind of “predictive” task is easy for computers because all the information needed for prediction lives in the computer’s memory; there’s no reason why machines should be able to do this better than humans can unless there’s something wrong with how we think about our world (which may be true).

Other types of tasks require more creativity from computers because they rely on concepts that aren’t easily represented as digital bits or numbers—like recognizing objects in images or understanding human language (these are called supervised learning). These kinds of tasks require powerful computing hardware like GPUs which are made specifically for making sense out of big datasets by analyzing patterns within them—but even then it still isn’t trivial.

Conclusion

I hope these five tips have given you a good sense of what to expect from AI. Get excited about its capabilities, and don’t be afraid to try it out for the first time. You might be surprised by how easy it is!

To put all this AI talk into context, AI wrote 95% of the above post. I went to Copy.ai and I created the Headline, then the program produced an outline. I then asked a few questions regarding that outline, pressed a button and it created most of this post.

I did go back in and edit 11 things that were, “wrong,” with the article, but I use another free AI program called Grammarly that checks everything for me, and I can decide if I want to keep the suggestions or not.

You don’t have to use the content that AI creates for you word for word, but it definitely speeds up the process. I wrote a post yesterday that took 2 hours and was 1159 words. As of right now, this post is 1340 words and going to go up with every keystroke and AI wrote most of the words above the Conclusion in less than 2 minutes. In fact, it wrote the whole article faster than I wrote this last paragraph.

Some call AI’s writing, “soulless,” but I wouldn’t call it that. If you didn’t know that a machine wrote most of what’s above the Conclusion section, could you have told a machine did it?

For all you Apocalyptic people out there, don’t put your head in the sand on this AI revolution. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not and you might as well start familiarizing yourself with some of what’s going on now.

Good places to start are OpenAi, Chat GPT and Dall-E2. Google them now, because soon enough, Google will look like MySpace.

5 Things to Do First, When Starting Your Business

This is more about the video I made for this than it is the actual title of this post. I have recently started using OpenAi’s Chat GPT. I’ve been running down the rabbit hole on this one. In case you don’t know what Chat GPT is, I’d say Google it and go play with it, because it’s going to surpass Google in the next elevation of search.

I’m not going to try to convince you here. All you need to know is it’s the newest latest and greatest on the internet. Basically, you type a question in the search bar, and it will spit out an answer. The more detailed you get the with question, the more interesting answers you’ll get.

I asked it, “What are 5 things you should do first when starting your business?”

It gave me about a 1500 word essay with several points that you should do.

Then I went over to a video editor call Veed.io (<–See what they did there?) I then hit the New Video button. I cut and pasted the 1500 character essay from Chat GPT into the Text to Speech box. But on Veed, you can only use 1000 words with the free version. So I paired down Chat GPT’s essay to 1000 characters or less. I believe it is in the high-990’s when I finished my edit. It may even be 1000 exactly, and if you actually count that, you have too much time on your hands.

I then picked some scenarios to go with the words. I was able to drag and drop them on a timeline. I could shorten up the scenes, drop in others and create intros and outros.

The video you are about to see is my first attempt at creating a video. A.I. wrote the script from the question I asked it. I then edited that text and created the closed captioning. I didn’t have to type the whole script out, it literary was a click of a button and I went in to make sure the words matched. There were only a couple small mistakes I had to fix.

The voice on the video is an A.I. voice that I picked. Looking back, I should have slowed her voice down a little, but it was my first crack at it.

I also figured out that questions don’t always sound good with A.I. when they read them aloud. Then when I went back to change the wording in the question, I couldn’t figure out how to re-record it from the Text-to-Speech box.

The point is, it took me about an hour of sitting down, firing up my computer, going back and finding the sites, researching them, getting my video link, signing into WordPress, thinking about things I should change on the home page, which this all started off searching for early works of Leonardo Di Vinci for another essay I was writing…my point is, humans get side tracked. Chat GPT spit out a 1500 character essay in about 25 seconds and this post took me almost 2 hours to create with the video embedded into the site.

Learning to make the video was very intuitive. I watched a video on YouTube that briefly explained the above in about 4 minutes. It then took me about 5 minutes to get the text and pictures picked out. The hardest part was editing the Closed Caption to match the scenes and outros. The whole thing took me about an hour to create for about 1:20 seconds worth of video material. But again, it was my first time. All said it done, I spent about 3 hours on this project, including explaining it here. I could probably crank one out the next one in about 10 or 15 minutes, and the next time after that will be even quicker. You have to start somewhere and teaching someone else is the easiest way to get a skill down even faster.

Ok, enough of the technical. If you haven’t played with the stuff talked about above, I’d encourage you to START!

Click HERE

How to Create Your Own Gratitude Project

Every weekday I wake up about an hour and a half to two hours before I have to start getting ready for work. I haven’t been a religious person for over 30 years, but I recently heard about, Waking up and getting your gift. Meaning, that when you wake up before your alarm goes off, that’s the universe telling you to get up and claim the gift it’s trying to give you.

Since I heard that, I’ve been waking up between 5:00 am and 5:30 am every day for weeks now. The first thing I do is, lie there thinking, Do I really want to wake up?

Then I hear my voice in my head say, “Get up and get your gift.”

I kick the covers off and put my feet flat on the floor and I thank the Universe that I’m alive, that I’m able to enjoy this time for myself and then I think of a few more things that I’m grateful for before I get up and go to the bathroom.

After I do that, I usually go to my library and pick out a random book. It kind of depends on my mood. Today I picked the book, Work with Passion—How to Do What You Love for a Living, by Nancy Anderson.

The book was written in the early 80’s, but there was a quote from G.K. Chesterton’s Autobiography that read, “…The chief idea of my life, I will not say the doctrine I have always taught, but the doctrine I should always have like to teach, that is the idea of taking things with gratitude and not taking things for granted.”

It’s very easy to take things for granted, especially when it’s an everyday occurrence. Whether it’s your job—which you probably really wanted and needed when you applied. To your significant other, which you would have moved mountains for and driven 100 miles to see when you first got together. When these situations become commonplace, we end up taking them for granted.

Take Notice

One way you can combat this is by taking notice and being grateful for the small things. The other day when I woke up to, receive my gift, I remember being grateful for my condo and for not being homeless, which I could have easily been because of my past problems with alcohol.

From there, sitting on my bed in the dark with my feet flat on the ground, I started listing out all the things I was grateful for just in my kitchen. I am grateful for ice and that I have a refrigerator to keep my food cold. I’m grateful for clean water to drink. I’m grateful for my dishwasher and that I have one. I’m grateful for my stove and oven and that they both work. By the time I got to the fact that I have two microwaves in my kitchen, my grateful meter was off the chart and I knew I could be done.

The Gratitude Project

My girlfriend had completed The Gratitude Project in the past. We had talked about it the other day when my daughter and I were visiting her at her house. She had a picture from a coloring book, which she had colored with markers that said, “Have an Attitude of Gratitude.”

I thanked her for putting up with all my shit over the past 8-years. (Tomorrow is the 8th anniversary of us dating.)

I was conscientious that it took a serious incident for me to see it all so clearly now and I texted her today on my way to work to tell her about the quote I had read this morning.

Reading The Signs

When I got to my office this morning, one of the ladies had put this rock on my desk.

I hadn’t told her anything that I’m writing about here. But now that I’m not drinking and I’m taking notice of things, I have realized that the Universe is giving me little signs that I’m heading down the right path.

So the next time you wake up before your alarm, remember, to wake up and receive your gift from the Universe. You never know, it could be the winning Power Ball numbers. (Believe it or not, many Power Ball winners received their numbers in a dream or believe they manifested it.) Don’t miss your chance tomorrow.

3 Easy Videos To Help Create Your Own Brand

You have an idea for a business and you want to create a name and logo that reflects that business. When I was thinking of a name for my business, I spent many hours pondering over the idea and image that I wanted to convey.

The funny thing is, one of the videos that I watched talked about not wasting your time thinking about the name or the logo, instead spend that time and take action in actually getting clients and selling either the goods or the services that that business provides.

Here are the two logos that I chose for my own businesses. When I worked in the mortgage industry, my co-workers called me, “Diamond Doug.” I thought it had a ring to it and so I incorporated it into my business names–Diamond Digital Properties and Diamond Digital Publishing.

I watched the below videos before settling on the name and logo. My daughter helped narrow down the logos that I had designed. (You can use Canva or hire someone to do it for you on Fiverr.)

If you look carefully, you can see my initials DTW in the diamond. If you can’t see it, don’t worry about it, it’s my own private nod to my name. (My daughter thinks the “D” is a stretch as it looks like an upside-down triangle and that triangle is also the base of the “T”. But if you’re into typography as much I am, you can make letters out of anything.)

Here are the videos I recommend watching. The first one is about the psychology behind the name or creating an unforgettable name.

The next one is great for logos:

How To Make A 365-Day Project: Me Showing My Work

Hi. It’s been a long time. Five years and 1 month and a few days actually. That’s how long it’s been since I’ve written anything on this blog.

I’ve kept the site up and running because I knew that I would return to it. I had previously written 263 posts, essays, short stories, poems, and videos here. When I returned to it, the behind the curtains, didn’t even look the same; meaning the format is different. Cleaner.

My life looks totally different today than it did six weeks ago. I’m living in a new condo with my daughter where I have her half the time. My girlfriend and I’s relationship is in a much different place than we were six weeks ago. More distance literally, but closer mentally. I’m now living much closer to my daughter’s school and where she lives with her mom the other half of the time. I’m back to researching and writing about my passions and whims. And overall, I’m in a much more creative space than I’ve been in a while.

Today I was watching a bunch of YouTube videos and I realized that nine years ago, I wrote about an author named Austin Kleon, who wrote a book called Steal Like An Artist (feel free to click the link) and another book called Show Your Work. What Kleon writes about is his journey as an artist and how if you do something every day to get you closer to your dream, by the end of a year, you’ll have a significant amount of work done. He also suggests that you Show Your Work.

So today I thought, I should document all of the YouTube videos that I watch everyday to show how people how I got to where I am in a year from now.

As soon as I typed that, I realized that it should be modified to, I’m going to use this platform to show my my work. Whether that’s posting all the YouTube videos that I watched that day that I thought were useful to me and I think will be useful to someone else, to posting my own writings, this will be my 365-Day Project.

I might as well start Showing My Work, because I’m back to working on myself and my writing. And even though I’m doing it by myself, that doesn’t mean I have to do it alone in vacuum.

I’m going to stop here because I don’t even know if this is going to let me post or not and I’d hate to do all this writing for nothing, just to find out this isn’t even the right place for it. Please enjoy the videos if it does work out on the first try.

ON 2nd THOUGHT…I just went and looked at all the videos that I watched on YouTube today and I’m up to 21 videos. Having said that, I’ll pass on the one’s that I think are leading me toward a better path.

I was looking for video editor and I watched this…and this lead me to the one below it, which has a weird story…

For some reason this Manifesting story was next to this video on the side of YouTube. I click on it and watched a few minutes of it. There was a quote in the comment section that I wanted to copy, so I went to my program and right about Word, was my Video Editor that I’ve had on my laptop the whole time.

I had already spent at least 3 to 5 hours researching video editors.

From here, somehow the manifesting turned into people who manifested their lottery stories: I Manifested 3.2 Million Dollars112 Million Dollar and $112 Million Dollar Interview

Those interviews turned into this one where a early-20’s something drop-shipper vlogger turned $1000 into $8 million and that turned into this guy who stops people on the street in Beverley Hills and asks them what they did to earn their money. That’s when I realized, I needed to stop wasting my time for the day on watching videos and I needed to start creating something.

Hopefully you will find something useful to watch on here. Or maybe you can skip all of that create your own thing for the day.

P.S. On Motivation For The Day

A subscriber wrote me and said that there wasn’t a link to yesterday’s video. It appears it was only embedded on the site. Click here if you care to see the video.

(And I’ll have to remember that for next time.) Thanks.