A Quick Post Regarding The Use Of AI...



Recently, I found myself in a situation where I had neither the time nor the resources to examine an idea for a small piece of content for my site. However small, it was something that I considered to be important to the end user experience here at Shhhh! Digital Media and in all honesty, its probably something that most of you don't even know about this site, as there are many little hidden nooks and crannies here.


But before I continue, I'll need to give you a little bit of background.


I sometimes watch movies while I work, whether I'm writing, coding or doing artwork, I like to have something else going on that helps prevent me from developing content myopia. You know, when you focus on something too much, you're often less productive with it than if you balance it with other activities to diversify your attention.


So I decided that I'd take my movie watching while I work habit to the next level, by including it as a sort of pseudo-brand of content. I just wanted something where I could share what I was watching and when as most of what I watch is available on streaming platforms. Some of them pay, while some of them are free. 


That's how my Shhhh! Digital Media Watch Party Channel came into play. Pun intended, as in to play a movie...? I know, it needs work.


So what I do is I pick a different movie almost every day, and I post it to that page on a schedule and at that particular time, I watch that particular movie. My readers who happen to find that page can then check the schedule if they want to synchronize their watching schedule with mine. Its available as a link off of the main Shhhh! Digital Media website at https://www.shhhhdigital.com under the menus at the top, just beneath the title logo.


So basically I've been doing that with movies for the last two weeks, shortly after adding my video game activity as well on a page.


For each following movie, I pick something that connects the two movies. Such as both movies having the same actor, or director, or composer, or plot elements for instance.


Recently, I played the movie Beetlejuice (1988) and wanted to follow it up a couple days later with the movie Firestarter (1984), but I could only find a very small connection between the two movies that was kind of lame on its own. That's where AI comes into play.


So, not having tried any of the recent AI chat platforms, I decided to check out Google Bard. It was the most easily accessible for me, and I began conversations with the AI from that point. Ever since, it has been an immensely helpful tool for insight and sometimes even discussion. However, I'll stick to this topic.


So I posed the question to Google Bard to help me find the connections between the two movies, and Bard responded with a great and meaningful piece of information that I couldn't resist using for my Movie Connection between Beetlejuice and Firestarter.


From that point I was confronted by the fact that I'm going to have to deal with the possibility that AI might become an important tool for the survival of Shhhh! Digital Media, so I decided to deal with that topic in these next couple of paragraphs and also to give credit to Google Bard:


Notes And Credit Due: In all honesty, I have to credit this connection to the amazing abilities of Google Bard. Although I was initially going to go with the similarities between Lydia and Charlie before talking with Bard about the topic, Google Bard found so many ways that the two movies are connected via similar plots that I had to include Bard's observations.

This brings up an interesting point in that Bard and other platforms are great tools for content elaboration. Whereby the content creator has an idea for interesting content, but they don't have the time or resources to extrapolate the kind of information they need to make it meaningful to the end user. That's exactly where Google Bard, Open AI and Microsoft's ChatGPT, Amazon's Titan and Bedrock and IBM's Watson come into play. 

I do not use AI (artificial intelligence) at the time of this writing to create content (yet), but I have no plans to use it for writing or to create plots for my stories ever. I will always create the plots and do the writing myself, though I at times benefit from a spell checker and on very rare occasions, grammar proofing. 

In the future though, I will be examining in detail the many options there are for using AI in content creation, especially for interactive media.

Also, I will be trying other AI platforms for similar extrapolation as finding the connections between two seemingly unrelated movies as it has resulted in a great value albeit for a small obscure part of my site. I suspect that in the future however, that these small pieces will accumulate over time to add much value and entertainment to the site.

Once again, thank you to Google Bard for that addition to my site :-)

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