How to Use A.I. for Family Time
Hello! Here’s another edition of On Tech: A.I. This pop-up email will teach the reader the basics of artificial intelligence. How it operates, and how you can use it.
This week, I guided the reader through transforming A.I. into an instructor or researcher assistant. In the last installment of our How-To editions, we’ll use what we learned to maximize family time.
We’ll look at the tasks that consume a lot of time and energy at home. Planning meals every week is a huge chore, and giving gifts can be challenging, especially with many holidays and birthdays to celebrate throughout the year. Anyone who has read books for children understands that they can get boring, and the stories don’t always relate to a child’s life or their growing problems.
Meal plans
Private chefs and foodies embrace A.I. to design elaborate meal plans considering people’s preferences and dietary restrictions. (Cooks tend to be less enthused on A.I.-generated recipes and can be a disaster if a bot fails to follow the instructions.)
A New Generation of Chatbots
A bold new world. A new breed of chatbots driven by A.I. has set off the world to see if this technology will alter the economy on the web, transforming current giants into the apocalypse and creating the next generation of giants in the business. These are the bots you need to be aware of:
ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model developed by an academic research lab called OpenAI. It has been in the news since November due to its capacity to answer complex questions, compose poem codes, plan vacations, and translate different languages. GPT-4, the most current version, introduced in mid-March, can be responsive to photos (and take the Uniform Bar Exam).
Bing. Two months after the ChatGPT’s launch, Microsoft, OpenAI’s primary investor and partner, also added an identical chatbot that could have unlimited text conversations about virtually every subject on the Bing web search engine. However, this bot’s sometimes incorrect, confusing, and bizarre responses attracted the most attention following its launch.
Bard. Google’s chatbot, Bard, launched in March and was available to several United States and Britain users. Initially, The idea was to create an instrument for creativity designed to write poems, emails, and pictures. Bard can generate concepts or blog posts and answer questions using opinions or facts.
Ernie. Baidu, the search giant Baidu, launched China’s first major competitor for ChatGPT in March. The launch of Ernie, which stands for enhanced Representation by Knowledge Integration, turned out to be a complete failure following a promise of a “live” demonstration of the bot was discovered to be recorded.
As it turns out, generating meals is a potent skill for chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bing. The more precise you can be in your request, the more accurate you can be. For instance, a private Chef post on Reddit posted the example question to provide a three-day food plan for a vegan with diabetes and an allergy to nuts.
I requested on ChatGPT an organized meal plan that could be formatted into a printable chart that can be pinned to the fridge. This is the question I received:
As an individual chef, I have a two-person family along with my partner. Make meals for us over five days, which includes breakfast, snacks, lunch, and dinner. We enjoy Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Italian food. I am a meat lover; my wife loves seafood and chicken. There are no limits. We are working to lose a few pounds following the pandemic.
Generative AI typically yields different results from one prompt. If you wish to move the deck and receive slightly different menu choices, it is possible to enter the prompt repeatedly. Also, alter the prompts to achieve different outcomes.
What are the actual recipes to prepare these meals? I responded with the following question: “Can you find recipes for all those meals ideas? Please provide a link the recipes online so that I can look up the sources.”
ChatGPT replied with a lengthy list of recipes from various sites such as The Food Network and BBC and various specific food blogs.
(The subscription-only version with GPT-4 yielded the most effective results. The free version without GPT-3 has returned broken links, likely due to outdated training data. Bing’s chatbot from Microsoft is adept at this kind of query. However, Google’s Bard bot did not return specific recipe links.)
One final tip: Ask your bot to create the ingredients needed for each recipe. It could even organize them according to aisles in the grocery store.
To ensure your safety, double-check the recipes to ensure your bot isn’t experiencing hallucinations.
Gifts
Let’s talk about giving gifts- an ability a few people have better than others. A variety of A.I. tools are designed to help assist in selecting an estate and include a website that offers advantages in response to an Instagram account.
I prefer DreamGift, which uses a chatbot that asks questions about the gift recipient’s age or gender, interests, and interests, in addition to the amount you’re willing to spend. It also gives you ideas as well as links to order products on the internet. (My wife told me she liked a few of the suggestions from the bot for gifts, including an indoor herb-growing kit, much more than other gifts I’d given her throughout the time. Ouch.)
Instead of using chatbots, they can be a good option, too. Bing and Bard can be influential shoppers’ assistants linked to the search engine. The secret to getting custom suggestions is to provide a wealth of information about your budget and the people you’re shopping with.
Storytelling
Let’s finish with something more original. You can use A.I. to design a custom bedtime story or your children’s book on hardcopy.
Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard specific prompt that incorporates the preferred style of storytelling your child prefers, any other details you’d like to include, and the scenario you’d like the story to deal with. I created a prompt for a discontented child about moving to a different home. I suggested it include the characters that are familiar to me:
Perform the role of a child’s author, imitating “Frog and Toad.” My son is experiencing difficult times — we’re moving into the new house and switching schools. Write a story that will assist him through the change. Include pets like ours, Max and Mochi the corgis, into your story as characters.
The chatbot narrated a touching story of Max and Mochi, two furry siblings. They loved playing in the park but were devastated to leave their old home. However, they bonded and later moved to a new place of learning, where they made new acquaintances: Bella, the sprightly Beagle, and Charlie, the playful Chihuahua. All went well in the final.
You can create illustrations to accompany the text if you feel more ambitious. (We have covered image generators in a previous publication.) I had a request from Midjourney to design graphics for a children’s book featuring two corgis in a playground.
To create a book, I’d request Midjourney to create images that accompany each paragraph in the chatbot’s tale. After that, I’d use a service that allows publishing a book, like Google Photos or Shutterfly, to have the personalized children’s book printed and then shipped to me.
