Hello World!

This is my first post! I’m excited to come here to share what I’ve been working on, thinking about and reading lately! I think that the arts and sciences are so interconnected and I hope to explore that in my future work.

What I’ve Been Working On:

I’m currently in my final year at Central and have started work on my senior project. I’m designing a web accessibility crawler that I hope to be able to use in my work at Central, and as an open-source application that anyone else can use to improve their sites.

What I’ve Been Thinking About:

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how I can use AI in my work and in my life with less cognitive dissonance. I’ve gone back and forth over the years between the simplicity it creates, and the satisfaction I get when I do something myself. What I’ve come to understand is that while AI is just a tool, the way we use tools and what we choose to do with them is incredibly important.

I recently watched an interview by David Perrell, titled “How to Write With AI (Tyler Cowen Breaks it Down)”

In the interview, Tyler Cowen discusses using AI to research topics and to bounce ideas off of. While I had been acutely aware of the current culture of AI usage in software development, and its opposition by many artists and other creatives, this interview gave me an alternative perspective on the topic.

As a creative, I want nothing to do with AI in my personal hobbies. When I create music, the closer I can pair my brain with my fingers with my instrument, the more fulfillment I get out of it. When I write, putting down sentences allows me to gauge how I actually feel about something. Human expressions of creativity are innate to the human experience, and to shortcut them is to skip out on a tradition older than homo sapiens. The exhilaration I feel when I can transform wordless feelings into outside creations is restorative in a way that nothing else is.

As a professional, AI is quickly becoming integral to improving outdated products, processes and systems. The speed at which AI can produce code, copy, analyses or interpretations is unmatched. While, like any tool, AI should be double checked and cross referenced, newer models continuously improve and reduce hallucinations as Cowen mentions in the interview. In my work over the years as a developer, I have seen it go from producing nonsensical junk code to almost exactly what I was imagining as I was creating the prompt. In an effort to keep up with it, and to better steer a project’s direction as a whole, I like to read what an agent’s “thought process” was and figure out how I provide better directions. In the near future, I would like to set up a local model so that I can use personal resources instead of the cloud, so I can avoid the disastrous effects it is having on local communities

So, I landed on using it, but only sometimes.

What I’ve Been Reading:

I recently read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir to get ready for the new movie coming out! I was initially intrigued by the isolation aspect because of the game Outer Wilds, and also have had a lifelong love of space because of Star Wars. It’s a gripping story and just about as thrilling as it is humorous. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am getting more into sci-fi as I explore related works.

Currently, I’m reading The Shadow of What Was Lost by James Islington and am very much enjoying it. I found it in Barnes & Noble because of the Wheel of Time shoutout on the cover. It has definitely been keeping me hooked and I find myself just wanting to finish it all at once.