Grandchildren are good for a lot of things. One of them is keeping you up to date on the latest technology so you can at least bluff your way through a conversation about zoom, google.docs, tik tok… although as I write this I realize I am showing how far behind I already am. Things are happening so fast it makes my head spin. I grew up with the electric typewriter and then the word processor and then the computer, and now I’m faced with Artificial Intelligence, the infamous AI.

I turned to my grandson for help. “It’s incredible,” he began. He went on to describe the essay that AI wrote for him. “I just wanted to see what it could do,” he quickly added. “I just did it once.” [Footnote: his school in Germany now requires all written assignments to be done with pen and paper in class for obvious reasons. I feel for the teachers, correcting papers of highschoolers who never learned to write cursive, but I digress.] We chatted about AI art and how it can take a grandson’s voice and create a fake phone call that would fool a grandma. And then he asked me if I had seen the “AI Pancake”? I will include the link below if you want to see it.