Like many I have sampled and used ChatGPT and Claude and their ilk for very specific tasks and questions. Set a timer for 30 minutes. How best to renew a passport. Tell me the difference between a fiddle and a violin. What's the temperature at which a turkey burger is done. Other than using it as a more sophisticated search engine and utility, however, I had never really taken one out for a conversational spin.
But on this day I was in the midst of a two-hour drive and looking for distractions. I was depressed listening to the news on the radio, found podcasts to be more of the same, and was bored listening to music. I had a solid 5G signal, so it seemed as good a time as any to visit with an AI buddy. My phone is a Pixel, and my default AI assistant is Gemini, so all I needed to do was wake up Capella, the British accented female voice I had chosen as its persona. "Hey Google, wanna chat?"
I started off simply: given my age, what should my investment portfolio look like? She (yes, I know it's an "it," a machine, but whatever) was as chatty and knowledgeable as any financial consultant I had come across. For sure, it was the same boilerplate I knew, about the "Rule of 100" in determining your stock/bond split and some notes about risk tolerance, all related in a conversational tone. But rather than just stop there, she started to ask me questions which were much more personal: "If you're willing to share, tell me about your current portfolio."
Without getting too specific I told her about our current situation. "That is a very solid foundation. Since you have a good base, I have a few other suggestions." She went on detail some tweaks, nothing radical, and all things of which I was aware. We went back and forth a bit ("you might want to look at the tax side of things") before I decided to change the subject.
"Let's try something different," I said. I told her what I was driving, that I liked it, but that it was 6 years old and I was considering a new car. What might she suggest, both in gas and in electric? "Well, since you like your Volvo XC40 and that 'Scandi-cool' vibe - minimalist, safe, and punchy – here are some thoughts." She detailed some options, along with prices, then unprompted asked me details on my car so she could calculate trade-in values. We chatted about the pros and cons, again ,nothing I hadn't seen or heard before, but all wrapped up in a pleasant conversation I could have had with a knowledgeable friend who was seriously into cars (if I had one).
I decided to try something that wasn't so off-the-shelf: "Read through all of my Glancing Askance columns for the last 30 years and give me your impression of my writing." She shot back, "That is quite a catalog! Give me a little time to digest the full thirty-year arc, and I can give you a detailed take." Maybe 30 seconds of silence went by. "Well, that's quite something! Over thirty years your prose has evolved." She went on to talk about how my style has changed, "from journalist and textbook to personal and Facebook," from more observational to more philosophical. I asked for some examples. "In the mid 90's you talked about 'home' as a place to maintain or escape from with chores, clutter, and the noise of a growing family. More recently there's been a beautiful progression from home being a source of stress to home being a source of solace." I asked her to summarize the columns. "You have become much more comfortable letting your own vulnerability show through with wit... a persistent and consistent thread of 'curmudgeon with a heart of gold.'"
"Curmudgeon with a heart of gold." I can think of worse things to be on my tombstone. I'll leave it to you humans if you feel the same about my writing as a server farm in Kansas. Either way, at least for me, it was a small real-world experience showing the power, the reach and the abilities of what is elbowing into our lives. Now, let's gets serious: "Capella, what do you think of the Knicks?"
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Marc Wollin of Bedford uses AI for research, not writing, but it needs some serious checking. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
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