Hey everyone, today’s Easter Sunday, so happy Easter.

I thought it’d be a good time for a podcast to talk about one of my subjects that I haven’t done an update on for a while.

But first of all, I am again messing around with my recording options, my recording equipment.

I am testing a new recorder today.

This is my first recording with this new recorder.

I’m not going to find out how it’s going to sound until I get to the end.

Hopefully it doesn’t sound awful and I don’t have to re-record it because that would be no fun for anyone.

Well, to be fair, it would be no fun just for me.

So fingers crossed this sounds okay.

The subject that I wanted to talk about today was AI.

And it’s a subject that everyone is hearing about day in, day out.

There’s AI news, there’s new functionality, something’s happening, someone’s got an opinion.

I thought I would just take some time to give my views on it, my use cases, where I’m using it, and talking about whether I think it’s good or bad.

When AI first came out, everyone was initially blown away that this new way of thinking, this new way of interacting with ultimately information on the internet was incredible.

We hadn’t really seen anything like it before.

Up to that point, our only real way of searching on the internet was via search engines.

So Google, Bing, etc.

Everyone knew how to do that.

And that was the most popular way to find information.

When AI first launched, it became a bit more conversational.

You could talk to AI, you could ask it a question, you could get a response, ask another question, and keep moving forward.

It became much more conversational.

Whereas using Google, you essentially ask it one thing, or one phrase, and you get one response.

You then have to start again if you want to look for a different topic.

So AI made it much more interactive.

Everyone was blown away with what AI could do.

They had it taking law exams, for example, they had it providing medical advice, and it was showing really, really good potential.

But AI is moving at an exceptional pace.

I think a pace that no one quite imagined.

It’s becoming more intelligent day by day.

It’s becoming more aware.

It’s becoming more reasonable.

And ultimately, it’s becoming more usable.

There are many, many things you can do with AI.

And some of those things are considered messing around, which I will come on to later on, because we all get stuck in those trends.

But for me, the use of AI has replaced my usage of Google.

I rarely now use Google to search for any items I want, because I know that if I ask the question to AI, it’s more often than not, and I will say that because it’s not all the time, but more often than not, it will bring back the answer that I want straight away.

No scrolling through pages, no searching over and over and over, no going back and forth to websites that are probably not going to tell me what I want to know.

I can ask that question once, and with a reasonable confidence, I know that that’s going to be the answer that I need.

I think that is the biggest game changer.

AI is now how I search the internet.

Additionally to that, AI has become part of my everyday life, both professionally and personally.

Everyone knows that an iPhone and Android, to be fair, they’ve got a line of apps along the bottom.

Do I put the phone in there?

Do I put messaging in there?

Do I put email in there?

Do I put social media in there?

What goes in those four?

Because it’s limited space, and you need to really, really justify what you’re using that space for.

For me, when I add a new app into that bottom four menu, it’s an app that I use every day.

It’s an app that I always want to access.

It’s not a light decision when I decide I’m going to change it.

I’m going to remove one to add one in there.

A few months ago, I made the decision to move out my social media app, which at the moment is Blue Sky, and replace it with AI.

So AI lives on my menu bar all the time.

It’s become a part of my routine.

If I have a question, if I need some help, if I want to think about a subject, I go and ask AI.

If I want to get involved in one of the silly trends, I go to AI.

It is now part of my daily life.

And the same professionally as well.

It lives within my applications to help me better enhance my day.

This brings me onto one of the hot topics of AI.

How is it benefiting my life?

How much time is it saving me?

Is it making me more efficient?

Am I learning?

Because this is one of the topics that people are like, AI is meaning that we’re not learning anything because it’s just telling us the answer.

And I agree that’s true.

But you could say that’s been the case for a long, long time.

Since the dawn of the internet and searching online, information has become readily accessible and you can Google the answer rather than thinking about it yourself.

But you could go further back and say, well, encyclopedias and history books, et cetera, do the same thing.

But their argument is with all of that, you’re reading what is being delivered.

You’re taking that information in and you’re ultimately learning.

I agree that AI makes that a lot easier to do, but you’re still digesting that information.

One of the things I use AI for a lot because it saves me a lot of time is writing code.

Now I’ve been writing code since I was about 14 years old in Notepad.

I’ve been through the learning of it bit by bit, actually using textbooks and writing code out and learning how it’s structured.

Then moved on to using the internet and searching Google on websites like Substack.

I’ve done all that research and I’ve learned how to code.

A lot of it is monotonous.

A lot of it is repetitive.

Having AI do most of the legwork for you is a really good time-saving activity.

But I still read it and I still get a feel for actually what is being produced.

And one of the great things you can do is you can get AI to comment the code.

So actually tell you why is it doing it?

What does this code do?

And then you’re learning as you’re reading it and you’re still evolving your knowledge.

So I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing.

That applies across the board.

You ask it a question, it gives you a result.

You’re taking that knowledge in.

I don’t think it’s having a vast impact on our own intelligence.

All it’s doing is making that information more accessible.

Coming back to where I started this part, it’s saving us time.

I think the time-saving aspect of AI is one of the best features that it delivers.

It allows you to quickly and easily do those repetitive, mundane tasks that may have taken hours and essentially minutes.

And roughly speaking, it’s already saving me between about five to six hours a week.

And this is the reason it lives on my home screen because I know I can get work done faster.

It has become my sidekick to almost every activity that I do, whether it’s remembering a task or finding out information, generating an image, doing some research, deciding what product to buy.

AI came in very, very handy actually last night.

I wanted a plastic folder essentially that could fit a certain size of paper.

I knew what size paper I wanted to fit in there.

And I told AI that I was looking for a wallet for it to fit.

And it went off and found it for me in a matter of seconds and said, go and buy this.

Here’s a link to Amazon.

Whereas in the old days, I would have looked on Amazon myself.

I would have looked at various different products.

I would have probably copied out all of the sizes into another text document, then compared them to decide which one I needed.

Having AI there for me to make that decision was much, much easier.

I also use AI for maths as well.

I’ve always hated maths, never enjoyed it at school.

I wasn’t awful.

I was fairly average, but anything overly complicated with maths, I just didn’t enjoy.

I don’t have a numbers brain apparently.

You either do or you don’t.

I’m certainly no Rachel Riley.

Historically, I’d use Google for maths.

I’d use Excel for maths.

Having AI there, you can approach it with a question, with the figures you’ve got.

You could upload a spreadsheet of data and you can tell AI to analyze that information and it will give you the results you need.

For me, that makes my life much, much easier.

And I personally don’t have to stress about maths.

Really big tick on that one.

Let’s come on to some of the silly stuff, some of the social stuff, some of the viral things that people are using AI for.

Number one on that list is image generation.

For a number of years now, there’s been a number of image generation models.

Being honest, they haven’t always been amazing.

They’ve often struggled with understanding what you want.

They’ve struggled with generating things like faces, hands, arms, and all that kind of stuff.

If you wanted a human-like picture, they may have six fingers or three arms or just look really jagged.

And the other big thing they really struggled with is writing text.

It would either spell it wrong, it just wouldn’t look like a word at all.

It just wasn’t legible text that you could read.

But very, very recently, OpenAI, so ChatGPT, the main AI that I use, by the way, they released a new image model.

And it’s quite frankly insane.

The quality of images it can deliver is remarkable.

It gets faces right, it gets hands right, but more remarkably is it can write exactly what you want.

If you want some text on a signpost or text on an