AI Insights

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I recently got some insight on my AI insights from an AI.

I decided to ask ChatGPT:

I’ve written a fair bit about AI, see tags: https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/
and https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/tag/ai/, please share with me:
1. What is a prediction I most likely will get right.
2. Where am I missing the mark?
3. What’s the most uniquely insightful idea that I’ve shared? 

Here is ChatGPT‘S response… and I find it quite insightful:

I enjoyed thinking about this because your AI writing has a recognizable worldview. It isn’t a collection of disconnected opinions—there are a handful of core principles that recur across many posts. 

What follows isn’t a prediction of whether you’ll be “right” or “wrong.” It’s my best assessment of which ideas I think are most robust, and where I think your model of the future could be incomplete.

1. The prediction you’re most likely to get right

Your prediction that AI’s greatest near-term impact will come from amplifying ordinary people—not from becoming an autonomous supervillain.

This idea appears repeatedly in your writing.

Rather than worrying primarily about “AI takes over the world,” you focus on AI enabling:

  • bioterrorism,
  • industrial-scale scams,
  • personalized fraud,
  • cybercrime,
  • misinformation,
  • one malicious individual having disproportionate power.

I think history is already bending in your direction.

Technology almost always scales existing human intent before it replaces humans.

The printing press spread propaganda before democracy.
The internet scaled fraud before education.
Social media amplified outrage before civic engagement.

I suspect AI will follow the same pattern.

I think twenty years from now people may look back and realize that “AI as force multiplier for humans” was a more important story than “AI replacing humans.”

That feels like one of your strongest forecasts. 

2. Where I think you’re missing the mark

Interestingly, I don’t think you’re too pessimistic.

I think you’re not pessimistic enough about adaptation.

Your writing often assumes exponential technological improvement translates fairly directly into exponential societal disruption.

Technology often is exponential.

Institutions rarely are.

People aren’t either.

For example:

Autonomous driving may become technically solved long before regulators, insurers, unions, municipalities, and consumers allow full replacement.

Likewise, AI lawyers, teachers, doctors and programmers may become technically capable years before society reorganizes around that capability.

You’ve written about the “frog in the pot.”

I wonder if there’s another metaphor:

society as a giant flywheel.

The flywheel eventually turns—but much more slowly than the engine powering it.

A second place I think you’re underestimating something:

Humans don’t optimize as much as economists think they do.

Many of your work-related predictions assume organizations will aggressively replace humans because it’s economically rational.

Sometimes they will.

But humans also buy:

  • trust,
  • relationships,
  • status,
  • ritual,
  • authenticity.

Coffee shops still exist despite home espresso machines.

Live concerts thrive despite Spotify.

Teachers continue to matter despite YouTube.

I think there will be more “human luxury markets” than your writing currently anticipates.

Ironically, AI may increase the value of demonstrably human experiences.

3. The most uniquely insightful idea you’ve shared

This one surprised me.

I don’t think it’s UCI over UBI.

I don’t think it’s AI risk.

I don’t even think it’s “This is the worst AI it will ever be.”

Those are all interesting.

The idea I keep coming back to is this:

Students choose. AI delivers.

It’s deceptively simple.

But it’s actually a profound inversion of how educators have framed educational technology for decades.

Most discussions ask:

“What should teachers do?”

Your framing asks:

“What kind of learner will this student choose to become?”

That’s a much deeper question.

Because AI is fundamentally an amplifier.

It amplifies curiosity.

It amplifies laziness.

It amplifies expertise.

It amplifies ignorance.

The technology isn’t making the decision.

The learner is.

I think that’s an idea with legs well beyond education.

You could almost generalize it into a broader principle:

Humans choose. AI delivers.

That might become one of the defining philosophical ideas of the AI era.

It explains why the same technology can simultaneously create brilliant research, convincing fraud, deeper learning, and effortless cheating.

It’s a remarkably compact framework. 

One more observation

Reading a large cross-section of your AI posts, I noticed something that I hadn’t fully appreciated before.

You’re not really writing about AI.

You’re writing about human agency in an AI world.

The recurring characters in your essays aren’t GPT, robots, or neural networks.

They’re:

  • the student deciding whether to think,
  • the teacher deciding what to assess,
  • the scammer deciding whom to target,
  • the policymaker deciding what to regulate,
  • the employer deciding what work is worth paying for.

AI is almost always the catalyst, not the protagonist.

I actually think that’s the thread you could develop even more.

Many writers ask, “What will AI become?”

Your more distinctive question is:

“What kinds of people will AI encourage us to become?”

I think that’s your most original contribution—not because nobody else has ever asked it, but because it’s the lens that quietly ties together almost everything you’ve written on the subject. It’s a more enduring question than whether a particular model reaches AGI in 2028 or 2032, because it remains relevant regardless of how quickly the technology advances.

Fall colours

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I don’t miss much about living in Ontario, but the fall colours are an exception to this. Yes, the leaves change colour in British Columbia as well, but with evergreens being the predominant type of tree, it doesn’t have the same impact as you see in Ontario. A couple days ago I drove into Bancroft, and on the drive up from Toronto there were many areas covered with leaves turned hues of yellow, orange, and red.

I’m definitely here right on the cusp of fall, with a noticeable increase in the colouration as I headed north, and in just a couple days here I’m already seeing even more of a change. My trip to Ontario still has a couple weeks to go, and so I’m sure I’ll get to see even more dramatic colours and contrasts.

It’s absolutely beautiful.

Talented Trio

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I remember Jacob Collier as a teen, making well-edited videos of himself singing. I had no idea that he continued on to become a hugely successful musician. Last night I binge watched some of his performances. The ones where he makes the audience his choir are amazing.

But the most incredible of them all is his performance of ‘A Rock Somewhere’ featuring Anoushka Shankar & Varijashree Venugopal,
Live in Amsterdam.

These three are so talented! I listed to this 6 times in a row last night… a full hour of entertainment. Take 10 now and give it a watch.

Cruise control

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I had an almost 3 hour drive today and my car did most of the driving for me. The cruise control has lane assist, helping the car stay in its lane. The same cruise control is adaptive, staying behind the car in front of me at a safe distance and maintaining the speed of that car as long as it does not exceed the maximum speed I set it to. So, I listened to my audiobook, foot rested off the pedals, near the break, and hands gently on the steering wheel.

I like it. I like it a lot. I used to hate the dance of putting the car in and out of cruise control depending on the traffic in front of me. Now the car does that thinking for me. I know there are people who love to drive, and who will miss the feeling when cars inevitably start to drive themselves. I won’t miss it.

I’m ready for a fully automated cruise control to take me from driveway to parking lot, and safely home again. I look forward to the opportunity to do more with my driving time than just listen to a book or a podcast.

Also think of how much smoother traffic will be. Cars will communicate with all the other cars around it, lane changes will be totally safe, cars can accelerate from a traffic light significantly faster, and reaction times for unexpected incidents will be faster than humanly possible.

Bring on the driverless car, make it mandatory on large swaths of roadway. I’m ready for it.

Never feeling ready

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I heard this in a social media post yesterday and it’s sticking with me:

You’ll never feel ready because ready isn’t a feeling. It’s a decision.

How many times have I planned to do something then thought, ‘I’m not ready’?

Sure, this might not help if, for example, I’m talking about a test I haven’t studied for. There are the kinds of ‘ready’ that require preparation, planning, and practice. But there are a thousand little decisions we delay because we don’t feel ready, when all we’re really doing is delaying for fear of failure or embarrassment or rejection or any number of negative rationalizations that we create in our head that tell us we aren’t ready.

Ready is not a feeling. So don’t wait for the feeling. Ready is a decision.

Old photos

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Every time I visit my mom I end up seeing an old photo I haven’t seen before. Today it was a photo of my grandfather holding my newborn dad back in 1944.

I also saw some pictures that I haven’t seen in years.

And at least a couple I never remembered at all.

Tomorrow I’ll be helping mom put some pictures on her wall. I imagine a few more memories with be stirred.

I spend so much time looking at digital photos these days, it’s actually nice to hold on to printed copies from back in the film days.

Slower pace

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Talking to my wife tonight, I mentioned how things have slowed down now that I’m staying with my mom on my Ontario holiday. “No kidding”, she said, “You needed this!”

I really did. I’ve been kind of going non-stop since mid August. And between everything I did to make it busy, my time at home was dealing with our renovation and clean up after it was done or prepping for my next event. I’ve been moving fast for quite a while now and a slow down feels really good.

Sometimes you need to hear it from someone else to recognize you are right where you need to be.

Where does the time go?

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A few weeks ago I made some travel plan changes. I was planning to travel to Ontario today, but I called friends to let them know I was headed this way and one told me that they had a big party planned for last night, so I moved my plans to a day earlier and joined the celebrations.

I met these friends in 1986, when I went to university… 40 years ago. A few of the couple s there, and their kids, I’ve visited or reconnected with on and off over the years. They are truly awesome friends that I wish I lived closer to. But I moved to BC in ‘93 and visits have been sparse.

Also at the party were some of my friend’s friends whom I haven’t seen since moving. I was catching up with people I haven’t seen in more than 30 years. More grey hair and wrinkles, and whole families of kids to learn about, but still very much the same people.

An experience like last night really puts life in perspective. I’m left wondering how so much time could have passed? This will sound weird, but I wonder how ended up my parent’s age? I say that because the party included a live band, (a friend of the hosts who also met them 40 years ago), and as I looked at my generation and the next generation (my friend’s kids & their friends) dancing to Tragically Hip, the Rolling Stones, and even Led Zeppelin songs, I felt young again. I wasn’t a near 60 year old guy at a friend’s party, I was a kid at a backyard party. No adult supervision in sight.

Will feeling like I’m not old ever get old? Or am I going to forever wonder why I feel younger than I am… asking myself, ‘Where does the time go?’

On the move

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I’m on a plane headed to Toronto. It’s about to land. I’m going for a vacation to visit family and friends for a few weeks. The last time I did a holiday in October, I was living in China working at a school that had a week off in the month. It still feels weird taking a trip like this during the school year. I’m feeling like I’ve just had an extended summer, which will come to an end after this trip. It’s not.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be visiting at least 6 different cities/towns and will likely drive well over 1,500 km. The longest I’ll stay in any one place is 4 days, so I’ll be living out of a suitcase. Maybe this trip will be the thing that changes the gear in my head that feels like work is returning soon. Or maybe it’ll happen when I’m back home and into a routine?

Last Tuesday was the first time I went back into a school this school year. I visited a principal friend at a high school. Then on Thursday I visited my old school and spent some time with the new principal along with former staff and students. I had no pangs, I didn’t feel like I was missing out. The visits were great and then it felt good to leave.

Ultimately, I’m thrilled with my decision to retire. Zero regrets. I’m just not used to the fact that I’m this free to do what I want to do at this time of year. Thinking about it now, it’s nice to know that I don’t have to worry about a staff meeting on Monday. I just need to know if I’m sleeping on a couch or in a guest room? I like that question more than any that ever came out of a staff meeting.

My blog writing

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I just read Chris Kennedy’s ‘The AI Crutch’ where he admits that he relies on AI to ‘sand the rough edges’ of his writing. He goes on to say, “That may be one of the more interesting unintended consequences of AI. We spend a lot of time asking whether it will make us better writers, worse writers, faster workers or lazier thinkers. The subtler question is whether it makes us less comfortable deciding that something is already good.”

He linked to Dean Shareski’s post, ‘Delight #39 Spelling Errors’. Dean is more comfortable with the rough edges, and he states, “When I find a spelling error now in an email I’m kind of delighted. It means there’s a real human writing this. A human who was busy, in a rush, attending to other human things and clicked send before they fully read everything. I can’t ever remember being bothered by this but only delighted.”

I have enjoyed reading the writing of both Chris and Dean for about 20 years. I know their styles, and while Chris will use AI (and other people) as editors, and Dean is more like me, writing and posting with rougher edges, both of them have a voice and style that I enjoy… and more importantly, they share perspectives and insights that help me learn and grow.

I’m not remotely critical of their writing strategies. I love their writing styles. I don’t care if Chris improves a paragraph with the help of AI. I’d never think critically of Dean if I saw a typo or grammatical error in his writing because he didn’t use AI. Both of them have a distinct voice that I want to read.

I’m more like Dean. In a post like this one, I’ll publish with zero AI assistance. But occasionally I’ll write a paragraph, rewrite it, get frustrated with my inability to sound clear or succinct, and I’ll throw the paragraph into the LLM I’m playing with, (I only have free versions now so I bounce around). Unlike Chris, I won’t disclose my AI use at the end of my post. I also use it for definitions that I share and again, don’t always quote or identify the use of AI.

I’m not trying to be deceptive, in the past, I would do the same with a dictionary and not necessarily state where that information came from. I’m not writing academic papers, and I’m not being graded. Although sometimes I’m being judged.

I remember an example on my Pair-a-Dimes blog. I was writing about working with students on a project and a student made an error of about 100 years and I said she was off by a millennia. A commenter not only corrected me, but questioned whether I should even be a teacher if I’m going to make a mistake like that. In a subsequent comment I thanked him for correcting me.

I see the appeal of using AI as an editor. I probably would do so if I was writing for someone else, or if I was being paid, or had a specific audience where minor errors would matter. But I’m outputting a blog post every day, and I already find it hard to find time for longer posts like this one. Adding an AI assistant or editor would do two things for me, it would stretch the time required to write, and it would compete with my personal creativity and desire to write. So, for now, I don’t use much (if any) AI.

Besides, I break a lot of writing rules.

I’ll write a single sentence paragraph. I’ll write a one word sentence. Frequently. I absolutely love to use ellipsis… way more than they are required. An AI editor would have a field day correcting my writing idiosyncrasies… and sanitize my writing style. That would make me a different writer, but would my writing be better? Grammatically, yes. More enjoyable to read? I don’t know? Maybe. What it won’t make me is more likely to write every day.

So, you’ll catch the odd spelling mistake, although I tend to find those. What’s more likely is that you’ll catch a wrong word. You’ll find a ‘do’ instead of ‘so’ or heaven forbid a ‘then’ instead of ‘than’.

‘Fir’ the record, (left that in as an honest example that actually happened), I do reread my posts before publishing. However I’m notoriously bad at (or rather good at) seeing the word I think I wrote and skipping over the errors obliviously. If you want to judge me for that, it’s your prerogative, but do me a favour… please tell me. Despite everything I just said, it still bugs me that my writing has errors. I appreciate and never feel slighted by someone helping me out with a correction.

~

Ps. I use AI a lot to create the images that go with my blog posts. Again, I don’t usually state this anywhere, but I try to add a consistent style to them, and believe the use is obvious enough that it doesn’t need stating. If it was a human artist I’d feel obligated to give credit, but I feel no such obligation with AI’s trained on humans and not giving them credit.

This was my prompt I put into Bing’s Copilot for this post’s image: “Draw a stylized, abstract, watercolour of a piece of writing with many errors being corrected like you would see on a term paper of a C+ student. However, make it such that you can’t actually read any of the writing, the words should be a little bit blurry and impossible to read, but the corrections should look quite clear in red ink.” … and I quickly edited out the ‘C+’ grade it added in the top right corner.