Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

The final question comes from Govind Chettiar, who asks, In the past couple of years or so, how has AI impacted your daily life, if it has?

If I can’t find a photo I took, or if there isn’t a stock image that works, I’ll use ChatGPT to make show artwork. It’s cheap and fast.

Another use, but I’m not really sure if this is AI, is Grammarly. I’ve been using Grammarly for over ten years, and I’ve used it on every episode of this podcast. It is basically a glorified spell checker. All of the writers have accounts as well.

It now claims to be powered by AI. I’m not sure how much of that is true, or if it’s just marketing. I’m also not sure what the difference is between AI and a good computer algorithm.

But I’ve noticed that Grammarly now does a better job correcting grammar than before, and it can also correct spelling in context for proper nouns, which is actually quite impressive.

In everyday use, I basically use it as a glorified search engine. For example, I had a question a few weeks ago about potato consumption in Europe from the 16th to the 19th centuries. ChatGPT was able to perform an analysis on it quickly and much faster than trying to search for papers published on the subject.

In fact, as I’m sure everyone has noticed, even if you do a search on a regular search engine, you’ll usually get some sort of AI-generated answer at the top of the results.