Artificial Intelligence: What Is Real?

What do you think of images that attempt to mirror reality?

AI-generated image of “Older woman who is frustrated as she types on a computer.”

I was talking with a woman recently who retired ten years ago after a career as the head of technology in her company. She’s now 77 and realizes how much the field has changed over the past decade and she now wants to dig down to learn about how artificial intelligence is transforming the world.

I’m not a technology specialist, but I also want to stay up-to-date with new applications. Last month, I signed up for ChatGPT, a conversational software that writes informed sentences in response to prompts that you enter, after Crow’s Feet writer Jan M. Flynn produced a clever podcast in which she “talked” with the Chatbot. (Listen to it here).

I did one Chatbot conversation in which I asked a question, and the computer-generated responses were fast and somewhat accurate, though lacking the spark of texts written by humans.

I’ve been having more fun generating AI images on the software program Canva, where Crow’s Feet creates many of its graphics. Using an app on Canva called Text to Image, I typed in a description of the image that I wanted to create, then selected whether I want the image to be a photo, a drawing or a painting. You can be as specific as you like, or more general, leaving it up to AI what to create.