On the road…again!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

Dear AI,

Dear AI,

                              The world of computer technology is so advanced that I am amazed to know that I can now do things that I could never do before. I was always a bad speller, but with word spell-check I can now appear to be a good speller.  My grammar and sentence construction is so much better because Grammarly identifies my faults and suggests clever improvements.  And word-processing programs even allow me to put line drawings and pictures into my letters, and then suggests that I share them with my friends.  Even some people who I never met are able to see my shared thoughts.  But that is only the start.

Easy-to-use photo editing programs allow me to insert photographs of famous places like that Cinderella Castle in Bavaria, and then boast that I visited there many years ago.  Photo Shop also lets me import photos of rugged mountains from elsewhere, and use them to make the background more beautiful than it already is.  The pundits call that process making deep fakes.  Of course, if I ask one of a few AI assistants about the name of that castle, the name Neuschwanstein Schloss comes up.  I would never have been able to spell that correctly without the word search feature on my own computer.  Thanks to Wikipedia for that spelling; and for the photo of the castle itself.  In addition, Wikipedia gave me information about its age and other details that I did not know.

To be honest AI, I am a little concerned that some information-gathering ventures come back with outdated, inaccurate, or incorrectly spelled words, especially when it involves scientific descriptions, like the species names of trees and stuff like that.  Those professor guys tell me that they long ago established protocols on when to use and not use capital letters; when to underline stuff, what some abbreviations mean, and on, and on.   

I’m writing to you AI because I’m also told that we should not believe everything we read, including your stuff, AI.  They say there are risks involved in taking as gospel everything we read. Sadly, that is the case. Political parties regularly dispute purported facts, and some people just do not trust sites like Fact Check.org.  Why is that, AI?  If professionals from major political parties look for actual facts to counter unsubstantiated opinions, why would they be so dismissive when they see the results?  If fake news is really fake, wouldn’t a fact-check straighten things out, AI?  I’m asking you because you are smarter than me, have contacts all around the world, and have friends to help you sort things out.  By the way, you are my favorite teacher.  Sure, sometimes pranksters tell you things that are untrue…and then we see false, but not fake information.  Do you remember the old expression, “garbage in - garbage out?”, well it is still true.  You are just trying to be helpful and I appreciate that. But it is up to me to get things straight, or to put it straight.  Sorry for the obvious challenge to your vastly superior storehouse of knowledge.  Protecting my reputation may be up to me, but if it is true that thousands of dumb memes use AI to use you, actually manipulate you and thus spread false and misleading information, then we rookie computer users are in for a bumpy ride into the future.    

Frankly, AI the more I seek your information and knowledge, the more disappointed I become.  One search into the world of AI that I made recently got my age wrong by almost 30 years.  How am I going to explain to people that the information is wrong?  

(signed) Meeza bin Spoofin