Interesting Questions:
About
AI is here
We're going to have to come to terms with this ubiquitous technology. Setting aside the inevitability of world domination and human extinction, when properly used, we know AI offers mind boggling information resources.
The resistance
Of course there is resistance. We've been down this road before.
The Before Times
Remember when online search first appeared? In the Before Times, you went to a library and spent hours flipping through index cards in a “card catalog” just to find where a book lived. From there, it meant hunting through “stacks”
And that was just one library. Other libraries had their own catalogs. And if a publication you wanted could only be found in a distant library, you had to request it through “interlibrary loan” and wait days or weeks to receive it.
To be clear, everyone was in favor of a technology that would ease or even remove this drudgery. But there were concerns similar to the ones people have about AI today.
One, can we trust it. Two, is it stealing creators' IP. And three, does it engender intellectual laziness. In varying degrees these remain unanswered questions — which I will pose to AI at some point.
LLMs
So what exactly are LLMs, and what is their place in the AI world? Here's what AI says about itself:
“While traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) focuses on building specialized tasks — such as predicting data trends, detecting fraud — LLMs are a highly flexible subset of Generative AI designed explicitly for human language. Instead of following rigid logic for a single purpose, LLMs are trained on massive datasets to understand context, generate fluid text, and write code across a vast range of open-ended tasks based entirely on the conversational prompts they receive.”
LLMs scrape every available online resource. Aside from some basic filters, they don't discriminate. That's our job — to ask the right questions the right way. And that's something I relate to.
Which leads to what this blog is about
My thing is to ask lots of questions, absorb large amounts of information, synthesize what I've learned, and then explain it to others. A human LLM, if you will. So I thought it would be fun to ask in-depth questions and see how AI responds.
Interesting Questions covers a wide range of topics, which you can find arranged in alphabetical order on the Blog page. Each topic follows the same format: (1) Establish a framework, (2) Ask AI a focused, detailed question, and (3) Present AI response unedited.
Going down the rabbit hole with AI
What really makes Interesting Questions fun is the interaction of my autistic brain and AI, and its responses to my ever increasingly off the wall questions. I "go there," and AI follows me every step of the way. We're talking hardcore rabbit hole.
For those not familiar with the rabbit hole idiom, here's how AI explains it:
“To ‘go down a rabbit hole’ means to start researching a single topic only to get progressively entangled in related subjects until you are deeply immersed. This highly absorbing process typically causes you to lose track of time, and veer off into unexpected or unrelated directions.” I would add that rabbit holing often provides entirely unexpected insights. After all, you're dipping into a massive range of perspectives, some of which you might never have considered.
Note to file
I draw from a variety of AI models and combine the results, even in one sentence. Consequently, I don't identify each individual source. This is a blog, not an academic research project.
Also, I enclose all AI generated text in quotes ("xxx"). Everything else is 100% Ted. Most importantly, the questions are mine. Not to brag, but I've made a very good living by asking really good questions. For more about that, see my Bio.
A final thought
AI is us. LLMs pull from what we and those who preceded us published in some fashion. But as with any tool, the human using it has to handle it safely and effectively.
We have done this with every new technology. We're in the messy learning phase now with AI. It's an awesome tool — just like the printing press, typewriters, word processing, PCs, application software, the Internet, smartphones, social media, and now LLMs.
Getting the best out of AI — it's all in the questions!