Time flies, and so do flies. I mowed my lawn, and now the cloud of them is chasing me. However, instead of enjoying my afternoon tea on the deck, I came inside, closed the window and kept social media out.

So much for procrastination.

Since last week, I have been enjoying gratefully the energy I got back after the miserable months. Walking fast, not tired, and having all your senses wide open feels great. 

And the smells. The smells of flowers, summer and some people. 

One of those persons sat next to me on a train on Saturday when I returned from Wellington soaking wet. The summer rain got me, but unlike in the winter, I love rain in the summer. It makes everything smell so fresh, new and promising.

So, I got my dripping existence to the train, looking through the misty glasses that transformed into a kaleidoscope, trying to navigate myself to an empty seat. Then, the scent lured me to sit next to someone who emanated this sunny, pine forest and lavender-filled aroma.

I took a deep breath, sat down and without even looking at the person next to me, said, "You smell so good". 

It was an awkward start to an enjoyable 20-minute conversation about perfumes, odours, scents and smells and why we should trust our noses more. The young Māori man who triggered the interest of my nose knew everything about them. He was working at the local perfume shop in town, and I will definitely visit the shop.

Do you smell the roses? Or the rat?

When I was young, I donated £5 to rebuild Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames in London; my guide told me that another theatre called The Rose was not far from the Globe. And when the wind was right, the audience in the Globe could smell the Rose: the shit and pee that the theatregoers left on the site. The famous line from Shakespeare got a new dimension.

Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II: Juliet says, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet."

And that birngs us to AI.

Those lines from the bard (not the Google one, though) carry a deep meaning. We can name and label things, but do we know their essence?

AI can identify trends, patterns and past uses of any terminology, concept and connection, but it has no nose. At least not yet.

Generative AI will come, but it is not a doomsday when it appears; it is a new phase for humans to become more human.

To know, sense and understand the essence of something is human. AI knows, but it does not feel. AI can surface unexpected new insights from data, but it does not think. AI can be trained to such a speed and granularity that it feels like intelligence, but it is just a shadow of it.

But I am excited about AI because it is human-like: it hallucinates, has biases, and is full of itself and nothing else. Like you and I, but instead of being curious, it is contempt because, in essence, it does not think, feel or have any intuition whatsoever. 

And that's why it excites me: AI gives me tools to be more, but less routinely. 

There are dangers, but AI will not destroy the human race but humans themselves. 

I have been actively researching, trialling and using AI tools for over a year. First, it annoyed me because, as an editor, I got horseloads of shit from people who put ChatGPT to generate BS and then submitted it as their excellent work. It was like those days when desktop publishing came and colour blinds started to teach colour theory. But it is a passing phase.

Now, AI tools are getting better and better in their assistive behaviours. Learn how to instruct the tool, Rand, and you will be rewarded. The art of prompt engineering is the next big thing.

From nose to ears.

Last week, I added a link to my article about how important hearing is. The first thing we sense in the womb is our mother's heartbeat. 

As an old radio theatre director, I have been fascinated by audio. As a non-native speaker of English, I have suffered (and my audience maybe even more) when I hear my recorded voice stammering through English sentences.

But now AI has given me a new limb instead of my limping tongue. I cloned my voice, and it does a brilliant job in reading, for example, my blogs aloud. This AI tongue twists perfectly, never gets tired, and does not need retakes.

What took earlier hours to record happens now in seconds. You can listen to my AI voice below. I let it to read my previous article about the voice. I didn't edit this take in any way but left it as AI did it. Let me know what you think. Is it close enough to my voice? 

With this Eleven Lab's brilliant tool, I plan to make all my articles audible. My affiliate link to their site is here: ElevenLabs. Have a go. The possibilities to use the cloned voices are endless – good and evil. But as for now, listen to what it can do and think what you can do with it.

Back to the train, rain and smells.

When I was about to step out from the train at the Waterloo Station (yes, funny that we have in tiny Lower Hutt Waterloo), the beautifully smelling young man said to me, "Keep smelling, bro, it was nice that you put your nose before your biases. Mate, you don't smell bad either". 

Where did you put your nose today, and what did you smell?

Ngā Mihi

Jussi

Listen to my cloned voice and read the article

Here is the link to the raw recording of my cloned AI voice reading the article below. I would love to know what you think about it. I plan to hone the clone more and make it my podcast voice.