Abigail Berman

Tag: AI

  • Using AI to Generate Text

    ChatGPT and other AI tools are used all the time to generate text. The high school my fiance works at encourages teachers to utilize ChatGPT in lesson plans, yet students are constantly being forbidden from using AI text generation for assignments. As a student, I understand why. AI isn’t perfect and students need to be expressing what they’ve learned, which we cannot do if we upload an assignment to an AI program.

    I decided to try it myself. I prompted ChatGPT to create a blog post for me. I asked it to explain why Trump chose his cabinet picks for his second administration. I was curious as to what kind of reasoning it would provide for some of his more outlandish choices. However, I was extremely disappointed. 

    ChatGPT framed it’s response as to what it would assume Trump would pick if he were to be elected again, and the nominees were based on prior cabinet members. But unfortunately, Trump did win and his cabinet picks are worse than we could have imagined. I put ChatGPT’s response into a Google Doc so I could edit it. The introduction and conclusion were very general and didn’t need much fixing other than the tense of some words. However, the bulk of the post required a decent amount of fixing. Aside from changing names and removing the secondary assumptions, some of the picks did not carry the same qualifications as what ChatGPT had suggested. 

    ChatGPT's response to my prompt

    Using ChatGPT to generate a post made it painfully obvious that it was AI generated. It took more time and effort to correct the text than it would be to write my own, and less enjoyable. I would have much preferred to talk about the horrible picks such as Elon Musk, Dr. Oz, or Linda McMahon. 

    And let this serve as a reminder, to NEVER use AI to complete a school or professional assignment. ChatGPT was so incredibly wrong in it’s generated text that it would make it obviously false to anyone who read it. And even if you did decide to use and edit it, that is way too much work.I still may play around with AI and see what it can do, but my use will remain recreational. I have used ChatGPT in the past to summarize a text, but after this experiment I will not be doing that again.

  • Can I use AI to create embroidery?

    I have recently added embroidery to my repertoire of various fiber arts crafts. With this new skill, I have embroidered my name and some cute designs on my Starbucks aprons. I embroidered some foliage for the fall season and recently just finished some string lights on my red holiday apron. My next project will be to embroider some snowflakes! However, I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding a pattern that fits my vision, but this won’t stop me!

    String of lights embroidered around the Starbucks logo on a red apron.

    Instead of pouring through books and browsing Etsy, I decided to take matters into my own hands and create my own pattern! The first step was to do an image search of snowflakes to get some inspiration for the individual snowflakes. I want a variety of shapes and sizes, and I found some great resources!

    line images of snowflakes

    This image I found on Vecteezy. It’s a great starting point! The snowflakes have great simple lines I can follow, and I can move the different snowflakes around to place them where I’d like them. Some of them are a little more detailed than I’d like, but I can always alter them!

    But my search for inspiration continued! The free images I found online are great, however they will require a lot of manipulating to be able to use them. I’ll have to figure out sizing and replacement. And although these aren’t major issues, it’s a little more effort than I’d like to be putting into this project. As someone who works full time and takes a full load of classes, I don’t have a lot of free time! I’d like to make this process as easy as possible.

    That takes me to my next source: AI! This is the first time I’ve ever used AI to produce an image. I did encounter a few difficulties along the way. I tried to be as specific as possible and found that DALL-E 3 did not want to help me when I mentioned Starbucks. And of course, AI can only do so much! Even with all the details I provided, I still wasn’t getting exactly what I wanted. In fact, the more I prompted it to alter the image the wonkier it became.

    AI generated photo of embroidered snowflakes surroudning a circle.

    Then I decided to simplify my request. I asked for an image of simple snowflakes, and was provided with an image that more closely resembles the free images from Vecteezy. But, since I had previously asked for snowflakes that would be easy to embroider, it gave me snowflakes that were embroidered.

    AI generated photo of 9 embroidered snowflakes

    With all of these resources I’ve gathered, I think I’m prepared to get started on my project. It will definitely take some finessing, but there’s never a project that works up perfectly!