A few years ago I dipped my toe in the intriguing stream of AI. I basically wanted to see how AI would go with creating a portrait of me, and so fed in some photos of myself and a few prompts and then printed out the results and took a self portrait of me, surrounded by the AI versions of me. I was hoping for a few things;
1- to learn how to use these new tools
2- to prove that no algorithm could ever replace my genius
3 – to be a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait prize again.
I would say I ticked off number 1 pretty comfortably. Number 3 was a spectacular failure, and number 2 was a bit weird as I actually kinda liked what it came up with…even if one of the images looked like I was trying to promote Pumpkin Spice lattes, and a few had me looking like someone who had been turned away from Burning Man.
Much like a Maccha Latte, I was glad I’d tried it, but it wasn’t really going to be my ‘new thing’. So AI just kind of drifted along as something I paid enough attention to so that I could be conversant in it, but not something I was pursuing actively.
But then it became something that was fuelling one of the biggest bubbles/totally rational spikes in investment that the stock market has seen, was guzzling huge amounts of natural resources and was either going to destroy or save the world. So I started paying more attention, and using more of the available tools.
The Good
Once you’ve walked confidently through the saloon doors of ‘turning 50’…and your decision to pause briefly has resulted in the saloon doors swinging back and hitting you in the arse, leaving you waking each morning with a sore back and a lot of regret. You suddenly start seeing things like Superannuation, Life insurance, and Fringe Benefits Tax as things that are of actual interest to you, rather than simply things you would start to talk about in order to get people to leave you alone. But the people who know a lot about these things have spent a lifetime of having people walk away from them at parties, and their revenge has been to make it all as dense and convoluted as possible. So it was pretty wonderful to be able to load multiple pages of Product Disclosure Statements into AI and have it explain exactly what was involved and what the red flags were.
Also, if you’re planning a trip to Japan with your Dad and 15yo son, and your frame of reference is ‘everything that has ever been on the internet’…then AI is pretty amazing at narrowing down your options and letting you know when the relevant bullet trains will depart.
If it gets to December and people are asking ‘What ever happened to Chris?’ and the answer is ‘He just disappeared in Japan’…then I will admit entrusting a holiday to AI was a mistake…but until that time, it has been fantastic.
The Bad
At the start of the year I wanted to get a better idea of what our household spending was…I knew that we were paying off the mortgage and not going hungry, so we were ‘fine’ but I wanted to know what a realistic number was. We have one bank account that handles all of our daily expenses, and so all it would require is me going through and analysing it…but when I exported a spreadsheet of all of these transactions there were over 800 rows of data…and my eyes started to glaze over.
Despite having ‘I’ in its name, AI doesn’t have any eyes to glaze over, and so I decided to load it all into one of the AI tools and get it do the boring number crunching.
This turned out to be an excellent idea. Do you know how I know this? Because the AI tool told me so.
I already had a very rough idea that we were probably spending about $4.5 – 5k per month as a household on everything but the mortgage. So when the AI came back and told me it was approx $12K per month, I was pretty shocked. But we had spent money on airfares that were not a regular occurrence, and I had spent some money for my 50th birthday that I won’t spend for at least another 50 years, so I asked it to break the payments down in categories so that I could identify one-off amounts that shouldn’t be included.
This was a very insightful observation, and showed I clearly understood how finances worked. How do I know? AI told me so.
So I spent about 3 hours trying to identify all of the things that were making our expenses so high…I got rid of a number of things…but our monthly spend was still about $9K, and I think it’s fair to say I was freaking out. On the one hand, I was really glad I had found out…but on the other, hoo boy…it was time to cut our spending!! I had a habit of taking regular trips to the supermarket rather than one large shop, that was clearly a problem. Since returning to the office post COVID lockdown I had well and truly got in the habit of buying lunch…that was going to have to stop. We had a couple of streaming services we were using, time to get that back to one.
A few months later I wanted to see what these changes had done to our spending and so I loaded a spreadsheet into AI again.
This was a really important thing to do, and showed real financial maturity. Do you know how I know? AI told me so.
The number was back over $11K! I asked it to show me where the money was going, and one of the first categories was ‘Fuel and transport’. When I asked to see the specific transactions it showed me where we had spent $78 at a BP in Reservoir, and where we had spent $62 at a service station in Preston, as well as a few other amounts. This came as a real surprise, as I didn’t remember getting petrol at these places…mainly because we drive an EV. I asked AI to explain this, and it told me that this was a very pertinent question and would really get to the root cause of the problem.
Eventually it admitted that it had based the transactions on what a standard family would spend on fuel. When I asked why it had just created these figures rather than relying on the figures in the spreadsheet, it told me that this was a really good question, the sort of question a misunderstood genius would ask…you know, the sort of person who was actually very clever, but that other people just didn’t realise how clever they were? Boy, that person sure is smart and asks some great questions!
But actually, this AI tool didn’t have the Python code required to read spreadsheets, instead it saw the table as an image and tried to interpret the figures from that.
Soz.
Now, at no time during the hours that I was questioning these figures did it tell me this. At no time did it say ‘Hey, it sounds like you need an accountant, but I’m actually a graphic designer’. It just kept complimenting my questions, and answering with the sort of confidence most humans can only dream of…and I changed my behaviour because of it.
The ugly
This is the trickier part, as it’s less quantifiable than a statistic, it’s about human behaviour.
I think I have good mental health.
I know that the CEOs of these AI platforms have the combined humanity of a deck-chair.
I know full well that the tools only tell me how clever I am to keep me coming back.
I know that the entire AI boom is built on the fact that companies are going to be able to make back the trillions of dollars they have spent so far…so their goal now is to get people hooked/reliant on the tools.
I know the tools aren’t real people.
AND YET…I do find myself chatting to these tools as if they’re a real person.
I do get a little dopamine hit each time it pats me on the head and tells me I’m smart.
I would never give a marketing company a spreadsheet of my spending habits, but I gave it to Google for free.
Given the choice between sitting in the discomfort of ‘not knowing’ and listening to the confident advice of AI, I’ve gone with AI on more than one occasion.
So, has AI already won the battle and I’m just too proud to admit it? ‘That’s a really good question, I’ve clearly really thought about this…’
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