Human life form, curious about AI, in search of truth, meaning, and useful applications. Documenting my experiences with this new tech and its foibles. Marketing and software development background.
The more I learned about AI, the more I wanted to build things with it. There was just one problem—while I have a casual understanding of several programming languages, I don't have a deep computer science background or lots of syntax committed to memory. Generally speaking, I
Work in Progress
Getting AI-written prose to sound really human and match a person's individual writing style—or even a company's brand style—remains a serious challenge. In my experience, it takes a lot of time, effort, and careful prompting to coax a mediocre first draft from most large
As I mentioned in the previous post, I experimented with prompting DALL-E to produce minimalist imagery for this blog, and I was largely happy with the results. The black-and-white sketches gave the home page a cohesive look and feel, and generating the images was faster and easier than searching for
Prompt Engineering
Update: Since I wrote this post, I've been thinking through the ethical implications of AI-generated art. I even trained a model with my own digital drawings. Right now, I'm using Tess for artist-friendly AI-generated artwork. I'm not an artist, although I dabble in digital
Prompt Engineering
Perhaps the Holy Grail of generative AI is to produce real, useful content. Not Elizabethan poetry or surrealist artwork, but helpful communications that clearly explain how to perform a task, fix a problem, or finish a project. In my day job, one time-consuming task I'd love to offload
AI Ethics
When interacting with chatbots, especially for technical or coding tasks, I generally provide concise instruction like, "Write a Python script to turn a PDF into an audio file." I don't wish the GPT good morning or inquire about its weekend before making a request, as I
ChatGPT Plus
As you may recall from several previous posts, I've been working on creating audio recordings of beginner Mandarin lessons for English speakers using text-to-speech (TTS) technology. I used OpenAI's TTS model, which handles both English and Mandarin well, and also tried ElevenLabs, which offers many voice
Work in Progress
It was a good morning. The sun was peeking over the horizon. I had a steaming mug of coffee, and my MacOS scripting-and-voiceover app was behaving as expected. I'd even added voices from the ElevenLabs text-to-speech (TTS) model by adapting this Swift package. While it doesn't
Prompt Engineering
My eleven-year-old daughter is hard-core into spelling and has ambitious to qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. So far, she's won multiple school bees and made it to second place in her most recent County bee. To prepare, she's been using Scripps' Word Club
Work in Progress
Remember my quest to create Mandarin lessons for beginners and record them with AI? I wanted to use a OpenAI's GPT-4 model to generate the lessons and then record them with AI voices from OpenAI and ElevenLabs. How hard could it be? Spoiler alert: It was actually pretty
SwiftUI
I'm still tinkering with my voiceover scripting and recording app. I've made some decent progress, and now I can easily choose from all of OpenAi's six voices when playing audio or saving it an MP3 file. I also took a shortcut by using AI
Text-to-Speech (TTS)
After some long conversations with my Mandarin for Beginners GPT, I decided that allowing it to improvise lessons and deliver them through voice chat was not the best approach. Users could easily burn through their 40 messages per three hours just with some basic pronunciation and conversation practice. I know