One more thing

 Yesterday I blogged about the new century and the fears we faced when the year 2000 came around.

But I realized that right now in 2026 we are facing a whole new, possibly life-changing situation - the rapidly increasing use of AI. 

As far as I know I am not a big user of Artificial Intelligence. I drive a ten year old car which, while very reliable, is not 'smart.' However AI has snuck into my life here and there.  

Most obvious is the AI bird feeder which my son gave us for Christmas.  It takes pictures of birds as they sit eating at the feeder and sends them to my phone.  That much is because it has been programmed to do so. The app had to be installed on our phones. Not AI.  But when I click on the bird picture and am immediately told it's a house finch or a blue jay or a sparrow that's AI.  

There is one problem about AI.  If you're using an AI search engine like ChatGPT it doesn't like to admit it doesn't know an answer so it will make one up.  There's a term for this.  It's called "hallucinations" and means just what you would expect it to mean if someone said a friend of yours was hallucinating.  

As an example of AI hallucination, when our AI bird feeder 'saw' a bird it wasn't sure of it identified it as a Hawaiian sea gull.  We had experienced a very windy night two nights before but I really don't think it blew any birds here from Hawaii.  I did a little further research and learned that Hawaii doesn't have sea gulls - lots of other sea birds but not gulls.

So the moral of this blog is take the information that you get from AI with a grain of salt, sea salt if you have it.