I’m not a fan of AI, but that doesn't make me a Luddite. It's not that I have an aversion to technology, just an aversion to technology that lacks guardrails to keep it more helpful than harmful. I’m beginning to see the inevitability of AI and the possibilities it offers, but I’m still deeply conflicted. I remain concerned about AI's hidden biases, the tech industry's inability to self-regulate against its misuse, and their proclivity to go down the rabbit hole of monetizing everything they touch.
One thing is certain, no technology cries out more for strong critical thinking skills than AI, and no society is less equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary to safely and effectively use AI than ours. But…it’s coming. I might as well start exploring it while I have at least the illusion of control, starting with what it can do for our travel business. Nothing about AI is perfect, and any use I might find for it in our business will come with baggage. Learning how to deal with the baggage is a necessary part of learning how to use AI, and I suppose now is as good a time as any.
Search Engines - Perplexity
I despise how greed and monetization have ruined search engines, including Google. For the past few years I've had to plow through pages of ads and boosted sites to get what I'm looking for in a web search, assuming it made the cut. Even when I search for a specific business by name, I'm apt to get some other website that paid more to be promoted than the business I'm searching for.
Enter Perplexity. Not the word, the AI-assisted tool. It’s more than a search engine, but for now that’s how I’m using it. I ask Perplexity a question in natural language form, and it gives me the answer. More importantly, Perplexity tells me the sources it uses to answer my query, and it even shows me which portions of the response it extracts from each source. It also gives me the option to go directly to the source if I prefer, and that satisfies the critical thinker in me. You don’t get that with Yahoo or Google, and you don’t get it with ChatGPT. I’m guardedly optimistic.
AI Images -- Midjourney
At the travel conference Janet and I recently attended, I learned about an AI image generation tool called Midjourney. AI image generation is one of those areas where nefarious uses of a good tool can, will, and already have, flourished. One of the things I like about Midjourney is that it has a strong user agreement and user code of conduct. I can only hope they enforce it.
Using AI to generate images is perhaps the most promising application of AI to our business with the most immediate return. I can’t just download an image from the internet and use it in a blog post or newsletter article. To do so comes with the risk of having to pay a hefty penalty for unlicensed use of a copyright protected image. Even free so-called public use image libraries come with risk. I learned that lesson the hard way, and it cost me several hundred dollars. Ever since, I’ve been paying to license images through Adobe Stock. It’s safe, but expensive, and I’m limited to its image library.
Midjourney isn’t free, but it is a third the cost of Adobe Stock. The real value lies in the creativity it allows me. Whatever image concept I dream up, if I can describe it in words, Midjourney will create it. Sort of.
The tool isn’t perfect, and I’m still learning how to “talk” to it. My first test of Midjourney was generating the image I used in my last blog post. In response to my prompt asking for an image with diners in a noisy restaurant, Midjourney produced an image with people’s faces looking like someone had poured acid on them. Or took acid when creating them. After about a dozen tweaks to my prompt, I got them looking more like humans and less like mutants from a nuclear holocaust, so I’m learning. Hopefully the tool is too. I’ll continue using pictures we take when we travel where I can, but when I need to get creative, I’ll be using Midjourney.
Writing – ChatGPT-ish
I love to write and have been doing it most of my adult life. You would think I’d be very good at it by now, but I’m not. My writing is stream of consciousness…disorganized and wordy, a reflection of how my mind works which, if I’m being honest, is a bit scary. I disguise my verbose approach to writing with lots of editing, which is time-consuming.
I like to be entertaining when I write. That’s my style, my voice. Cleaning up my stream of consciousness ramblings into a pithy yet still entertaining and informative product is where I hope AI can be a time saver. For now, ChatGPT is the tool I’m using. Grudgingly. When I took ChatGPT out for a test drive last April my biggest complaints were its lack of sourcing and its inaccuracy. Maybe ChatGPT 4.0 will be better, but I don’t plan to use it to write for me. Instead, I’m using ChatGPT as my editor, something to help organize my thoughts and to keep my content brief.
I tested ChatGPT’s editing skills with a 5000-word draft of a blog post. It did a nice job of organizing my thoughts, but when I asked it to cut the length down to 1000 words without losing any content, that proved too much. The best it could do was 1350 words. Still, I was impressed. Until I read ChatGPT's version of my article.
ChatGPT stripped out my voice, replacing it with its own generic style and leaving my blog post sounding like every other blog post out there. I had to reedit the post to put my voice back in…my attitude, my self-deprecating humor, and my personal anecdotes. That took me a couple of hours, but it was a much better read. It was also 500 words longer, a step in the wrong direction.
While adding my voice back in, I kept the organization and structure ChatGPT imposed on my writing. That made it relatively easy to find more cuts that didn’t affect the main point of the article and didn’t remove my voice. The result was a well-written, easy to read 1280-word post that is entertaining and informative. My writing, my content, my words, my voice, but with ChatGPT’s organization and brevity.
Social Media Content -- TBD
The only reason I have personal social media accounts is to see when my family and friends post pictures and videos, or when clients tag me and Janet in their posts about travel we’ve helped them plan. I don’t post often, and I rarely scroll through my personal feed anymore because of the overwhelming number of ads and suggested posts…all things someone else paid Meta to push to me. Things I have no interest in seeing.
Most of my time on social media is spent creating and posting content for our Tidewater Travel followers. We offer travel tips, pictures and videos of destinations, and every now and then we'll post a special offer. Not the fake specials that are just marketing gimmicks, but the rare true special. I’d love to find a tool to help me be more efficient with that. I don't trust ChatGPT to do it...it isn't transparent enough and it's too inaccurate to rely on for social media content. There are AI tools that would work, but they come with budget busting subscription fees. I'm hopeful ChatGPT 4.0 will be enough of an improvement over ChatGPT to make it useful when it comes to generating social media content. At least since it will be part of the Apple AI toolkit, I won't have to pay for it.
Improved Client Service – Apple AI
As an Apple user I’m excited about Apple’s integration of AI across their platforms and apps, and I'm eager to see how it can help us improve our client service. It promises quick reach into our extensive content libraries to find what we or our clients need, when we need it. Whether it’s a boarding pass, a price list, or an archived itinerary, Apple’s integrated AI tools have the potential to save us significant time. As disorganized as my writing style is, my filing is meticulous. Even so, I have so much in my archives the possibility of asking Siri to find specific content when I only remember fragments of details, and then getting exactly what I need in seconds is exciting. We’ll see if Apple can deliver.
Well...I’ve exceeded 2500 words so it’s time to hand this over to my editor. My goal is 1500 words and one hour of reediting… let’s see how ChatGPT does with this one.
And that’s all I have to say about that. (don’t cut that ChatGPT…its my tag line).
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