Neo-luddites and AI: A Retrospective

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If you need a review of the history of Luddite movement, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite. 

Let's start by thinking about photographs and digitization. The Kodak Professional Digital Camera System (a Nikon F-3 camera equipped by Kodak with a 1.3 megapixel sensor) for photojournalists was introduced in 1991. If my calculations are correct that was 35 years ago. Than means that would need to be about 45 years old to remember how quickly digital cameras replaced almost all film versions. Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was officially released on February 19, 1990, exclusively for the Macintosh. The internet, in the form of the World Wide Web, The first online version of the World Wide Web, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in December 1990, was hosted on a NeXT computer at http://info.cern.ch. It functioned as both a browser and editor, showcasing the first website, which explained the WWW (World Wide Web) project itself and how to use hypertext. As a matter of note, I first viewed the WWW when there were six websites. 

Almost everything I read is currently digitized and primarily online. Every photograph that I take is a digital photograph. Since Google's nano banana was integrated with Adobe Photoshop, all the photos that I take that I use any manipulation to alter are done by using AI in Photoshop. All the major genealogical websites are now almost totally AI-intensive. 

OK, so here is the issue. I am not a regular reader of Facebook but from time to time, I do read a few posts. I find a very vociferous anti-AI minority, mostly teachers and academics. I even see statements about how the posters are never going to use AI. There are also statements about how easy it is to spot an AI photo or article. This may have been an issue two or three years ago but my own experience is to the contrary. You cannot tell an AI photo from one taken with a camera because both are essentially the same thing. Obviously if the image show a dancing hippo or a waltzing dinosaur, the images are most certainly generated. 

If you think you are never going to use AI, you may as well turn off your electricity and move out into a camp somewhere in what little wilderness is left in the world because, shortly, almost everything electric will have some AI function.

AI is a tool. You must use it as the master in a master/servant relationship. You make all the important decisions. AI is not a browser or a search engine, it is AI. Here is an example. The paragraph above beginning with OK was written entirely by me not using any AI assistance. Here is the same paragraph after I told Google Gemini to revise the paragraph for grammar, spelling, and accuracy. 

"OK, so here is the issue. I am not a regular reader of Facebook, but from time to time, I do read a few posts. I find a very vociferous anti-AI minority, mostly teachers and academics. I even see statements about how the posters are never going to use AI. There are also statements about how easy it is to spot an AI photo or article. This may have been true two or three years ago, but my own experience is to the contrary. You cannot tell an AI photo from one taken with a camera because, at the pixel level, both are essentially the same thing. Obviously, if the image shows a dancing hippo or a waltzing dinosaur, the images are most certainly generated."

I used the suggestions from Gemini to revise my original paragraph and the rest of the article.  

Now, the quote by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: "AI won’t replace humans. But humans who use AI will replace those who don’t." Right now, if you don't know how to use AI, you don't know how to use FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage and most of the other genealogy programs.