In retrospect Nixon was a fuckwad in most respects. He can burn in hell for torpedoing Vietnam peace talks to help his election chances.
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And this was the main reason I can not give him credit for his other achievements. How many additional people died in his quest for personal gain?
Yay AI response!
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OK, you got me curious.
While I prefer to write my own posts, I have started occasionally using Copilot to do some editing of my longer posts, once I borrowed some ideas on standing instructions on how to frame normal interactions with me, which include some examples of my writing style.
This seems like a good excuse to see what it would do if I actually let it compose a response, something I’ve never been willing to attempt before.
Here’s the prompt:
And here’s what it gave me (best of three options, with it identifying it as the best based on similarity to my style):
That’s actually not horrible. It’s closer to my more formal writing style than my casual style, but it’s not jumping off the screen at me as being “AI” rather than “some of my stilted prose”.
I wouldn’t have used the word “Indian”, because even though it doesn’t carry the baggage of the “n-word”…it’s best reserved for use within folks who were raised within an indigenous context, and I’m not an “insider”.
Also, it needs further refinement. I’m comfortable with the good/bad labels, even though reality is more complex, and the comment is a bit more rehabilitative than I would want to present.
Still…I’ve liked the results I’ve gotten since I was finally clued in on how really to use custom instructions. I just need to get to a point where I could do something like: highlight text, click something, magically gets edited.
Eh. You can do it yourself.
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It also helps to have actually lived through Nixon’s presidency and witnessed his daily remarks and actions, which I did. Do you think 50 years from now that people looking back at the Trump presidency, who didn’t live through his daily utterances, can appreciate just how flawed a person he was?
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This. If I wanted to talk to an AI, I can do that on my own. There is no point in coming to a place to interact with what are ostensibly human just to talk to AI
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Since literally everything he does and says is recorded for posterity, I would hope that there would me more than enough contemporaneous evidence of his numerous flaws.
It’s not the same as being bludgeoned by it in real time. And who knows how history might be rewritten.
The rewriting history part is a real concern I agree.
It’s not like we’re giving formal presentations here.
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I use AI to polish my professional writing, to a very small degree. I take a lot of pride in my writing style, it’s like a fingerprint. So I use it more as a final editor to make sure my communication is clear for the correct audience, and I don’t auto-incorporate things in, I just take it under advisement.
So I’d never considered using it for social situations before! I can’t imagine I would.
Dead internet here we come.
But the important issue: have you found ways to apply it to quilting?
I’ve actually pondered if AI could do anything with color theory or patterns! But then I wouldn’t feel as good about my creation, so I haven’t explored it.
But I know there ARE a ton of shit quality AI quilting patterns out there that are either gibberish, outright fraud, or producing very wonky results when attempted. I see a lot of that on Reddit.
AI quilting patterns are for suckers.
I’ve been looking into it a bit for maybe trying to arrange colourse for a quilt with a crapton of squares.
Despite my experiment above, I’m not inclined to have AI write stuff from scratch for me.
I am occasionally letting it edit my posts. When I write longer posts, I do tend to write out of order, sometimes with a bit of stream-of-consciousness thrown in…and when self-editing, I do sometimes miss skipped words, grammar issues, etc. It’s only been very recently that I’ve hit on the right set of Copilot preferences and prompts to get it to do general cleanup without “AI-ifying” my writing. The main problem is that there are extra steps involved in doing that…and I’m lazy.
I am increasingly comfortable with letting Copilot handle meeting minutes. And recently I’ve been using it for a personal project where I have notes/information scattered across multiple documents. It’s doing a good job of keeping them consistent and organizing them appropriately, without doing more than the “cleanup” kind of edits I mentioned above.
It may not be directly applicable, but a couple of months ago, I had another project where I wanted an Office theme definition (for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint): colors that complemented the cover art, selected/ordered with accessibility for color-blind viewers in mind, and (just for fun?) fonts other than the over-used stock fonts that fit the tone of the package.
I’m not an expert on the subject, but I was very pleased with the result.
