Prompt Engineering
Good Bloggy, my first AI coding project, eight months later
From puppy chaos to AI innovation: My 8-month journey building GoodBloggy, an AI writing assistant. Discover the challenges and lessons learned.
Karen Isbell
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.
Coding with ChatGPT...the good, the bad, and the buggy
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
Blog writing experiments with GPT4-Turbo and Claude
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
In search of ethical AI-generated art
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
Achieving minimalist artwork with DALL-E...mostly
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
Prompting chatbots to write a blog about prompting chatbots
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
Should you be cordial to chatbots?
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
The thrilling conclusion: Mandarin for Beginners is live
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
Further adventures with TTS models reveal serious limitations
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
Debugging the spelling bee GPT
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
Building a macOS app for AI-powered script creation and voiceover recording
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
APIs the lazy way
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