This is not AI

This weekend, we had the opportunity to go to our neighbors’ for a traditional Egyptian Ramadan dinner. The invite list was more representative of a mini-UN with guests of British, South Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Egyptian and South African heritage. And, of course, us.

Like many of these experiences, we always learn a lot. About the world, about various views on the state of the world. About geography. About culture. And about technology.

After the meal, the conversation turned to the war in Iran and the state of politics in the U.S. You might be surprised to learn how knowledgeable all of the attendees were on this topic. They know about U.S. opinion polls. They know and watch Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel. They know and watch Tucker Carlson. They know about the polarization in U.S. media. They know about Marjorie Taylor Greene. I was surprised about a few of these things.

Then we moved on to other topics. We talked about how younger people are starting to desire “owning” music and are forgoing services like Spotify and Apple Music to possess a music library on a device. This made us reminisce for the good old days when we (some of us) made mix tapes from vinyl LP records on to cassettes. Ah, if I’d only saved my hundreds of cassettes (including at least 10 bootleg Dead Shows, only one of which I made myself) that I sold in a massive garage sale in Vermont….

Eventually, the conversation turned to AI. Two of the diners are deeply involved in tech and AI now. It was enough to make you both optimistic and hopeful and terrified about the prospects of how AI might change, and is changing, the economy, the labor force, freedom and war.

Which brings me back to my post title. Last week, I read through a newsletter from WordPress, which hosts this site and our travel blog (www.thetravelingridleys.com). It talked about the new built-in AI features available to help redesign the blog, edit and even write some of the text and generate images for the posts.

While I will admit I love the AI summaries I can get when I’m researching a location or history, I still go to the original sources. I still write my own content from those sources with quotes and footnotes when I feel I couldn’t even possibly improve on the original. But that’s why I do this. That’s why we have a blog. To make it personal. To connect. With a place, with its history and culture and, hopefully, with you.

So, call me old fashioned. While I sold the cassettes, I still have the vinyl (most of it) and I still intend to write original content with original images even if it takes me longer.