FISCHER: Computer, fix all my problems

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

Normally when I don’t know something, my first instinct is to find somebody that does. After all, that’s how my whole job works.

I admit it does probably make me a little annoying to my friends and tech support people as I’m more likely to reach out for live help before exhausting all other options.

Such was the case the other night when I was having some issues getting a computer program to do what I wanted it to. Without getting into the uninteresting specifics, the gist of it is that I wanted to be able to customize fonts, colors, and formatting of a chat program that I use and that required knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

And if you don’t know what those mean, don’t worry. I don’t either.

I know just enough about any of them to sometimes get them to do what I want, but overall I may as well be looking at arcane Latin spells.

My first thought was to go to the developer’s support Discord and see if the people that built the program could give me some insight about how it works and which lines of text I’d need to change in order to achieve my goals.

However, the developer I talked to was really only interested in general technical support, not rooting around in the backend for unsupported customization options.

Fair enough.

Then I reached out to a friend who, at the very least, has as much of a background in programming as me.

He didn’t have any idea of what to do either, but he did point me to a resource I can’t believe I overlooked.

ChatGPT.

For as much time as I spend online, I’ve never really engaged a whole lot with AI. I’ve messed around with an image generator for fun, but I’ve never used AI expecting anything helpful.

As it turns out … we’re living in the future.

I’ve always thought one of the less believable things about “Star Trek” was the computer. You just say something like, “Now adjust the rate of positron flow so the quantum flux display turns yellow instead of green,” and the computer just does it.

And yet, that is exactly how ChatGPT works. I spent the evening going back and forth with the program in the same way I’ve watched “Star Trek” actors talk with Majel Barrett’s disembodied voice for most of my life.

I’m not surprised at how easy it was for the program to read the entire text of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and modify it to allow for what I wanted, but I am shocked at how easy it was to make the program understand what I wanted in the first place.

The bottleneck between human/computer interactions has always been the biggest limit to overcome. Going all way back to the simple calculator, we’ve needed to learn how to work within the limits of the system’s understanding.

You can’t ask a calculator how many pairs you can get out of a dozen. It doesn’t understand anything but numbers and symbols so you need to figure out how to express that idea into a mathematical equation.

That’s the way it’s always been, from calculators to Google searches, knowing how to make the query to get the desired response has always been an important skill to hone.

And that’s what makes these AI programs truly impressive. Not that they can immediately access all the collective knowledge of humanity, but that they can understand you well enough to deliver what you want.

I still have deep concerns about AI reaching into areas of our life that should be overseen by human eyes and performed with human hands, but this train isn’t stopping so I guess I may as well get on board and make use of it.

– Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and we’re all in agreement to never ask ChatGPT to create an adversary that can defeat Data, right?