“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”- Albert Einstein.

The Vatican’s first presence on the internet was Dec 25, 1995. This was around the same time I first learned about the net, and I was amazed. There were no search engines then, so the only way to access sites was to enter a string command. I was so excited about the potential of this new technology and was dying to show it to people. My parents, in their 60s at that time, were one of my first victims. Having lived through the advent of the television, I thought they would surely appreciate this technological leap. At that time, my computer monitor, tower, and dot matrix printer were located on the top floor of the house. I walked Mom and Dad upstairs, sat them down, and hit the dial-up icon. The familiar scream of data transmission followed, and we were ready to enter the command. While we waited for the screen to roll into existence, I said, “Mom and Dad, it’s called “the internet.” The Vatican site finally appeared, and my parents looked on in disbelief that I had brought them to that room to see a picture of a building. I couldn’t accurately explain to them why that moment was so important, so I smiled, and we went back downstairs.

I tell this story because I experienced that same excitement last week when watching a ChatGPT documentary. The next day, I logged on and was met with a simple screen layout, which provided a few options to help determine what I was looking for. I typed into the text field, “Read the attached document and create a cartoon pictorial of its contents.”  Within seconds, a response appeared, outlining its understanding of the document and suggesting a pictorial. I answered, please proceed, and the graphic in last week’s blog, if accessed through the web page, was what it produced. This was within minutes. I was in awe. Mom and Dad, it’s called “ChatGPT”.

“Chat GPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer and was developed by an AI research company, Open AI. It is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot technology that can process our natural human language and generate a response. Simply put – you can ask Chat GPT a question, which will give you an answer.” – Google.

When the internet first came out, all searches seemed to lead to pornography; criminals are always the first to maximize the potential of these new tools. ChatGPT, on its own, has enormous potential and relies on humans for direction until it learns to code itself. Maybe this will be the impetus for mankind to come together to determine how we, as a human race, want the AI story to unfold. Perhaps we must suffer a bit more before learning that we are not separate and must stop living like we are. Time will tell how this book will end.

Until then, retirement will allow me to increase my knowledge of ChatGPT’s potential use in my blog and life.

Check out my site for this week’s ChatGPT pictorial of this blog entry.