How is AI changing your life?
Retiring at age 96
Clint Eastwood is retiring at age 96.
The famous actor announced recently that he had finished all of his projects and was retiring.
He has one more movie coming out, but he's already finished the work on that, so he's ready to retire.
At the rate I'm going, I won't be able to retire at 96 because I won't have all my projects finished. Maybe if I use AI more effectively, I can be more productive, get everything done, and retire at 96.
AI to the rescue
People often refer to AI or Artificial Intelligence as a program, an app, or a tool. Actually, it's all three.
Recently, I've been using AI to design A+ modules to post on my Amazon book detail pages. But with 35 books and each one needing three to five modules, it's not a quick process even with the help of AI.
In the short time I've been using AI, it's been changing and getting better almost every week. For example, a few weeks ago, when I would tell AI to design a module to be 970 pixels wide by 600 pixels high, it would just ignore the comment.
Then I would have to use GIMP to resize the module. That worked okay unless there was a human face in the module, and then changing the ratio made the image look weird.
Last week, I started using a new version of AI, and this version listens to my instructions about module size and makes the images the size I specify. That's nice.
Different strokes for different folks
There are several AI tools. Some are better than others for different tasks. Here are some very general pros for some popular AI tools.
ChatGPT: A general-purpose tool that's good with text and images. This is the AI tool I use the most. The new version 5.5 is a big upgrade.
Claude: Best for analyzing long documents and PDFs. It's good at creating written material that doesn't sound like AI wrote it.
Gemini: Great for searching and retrieving data from Google and YouTube.
Grok: Good for providing real-time, up-to-date data. Great for getting information from the web and X.
Most AI tools have a free version and multiple paid versions. I use the ChatGPT paid Business version that costs $20 a month. Previously, I've done a lot of work with their free version. r
The way you give AI instructions matters, also
The instructions you give AI are called prompts, and I've found that AI works better if I don't make the prompt too long or too complicated. I've found that I get better results faster by giving AI shorter prompts, looking at the results, and then giving it another prompt to edit or change the results.
Going through the process multiple times gives me better results and is faster in the long run.
I use AI when I'm working with images and analyzing data, but I still prefer to use what little intelligence I have and do my book and article writing all by myself.
Final thoughts: Maybe one of these days, I will be able to tell AI to "Solve all my problems" or "Finish all my projects." But AI is not that good yet.
To get everything done, so I can retire at age 96 like Clint Eastwood did, I'm going to need a lot of help from AI. What is your experience with AI? Are you using it?