Artificial Intelligence is the talk of the town nowadays, so when Google's Gemini AI app icon appears on my Chromebook, I decided to try it out. I asked Gemini the following question: "In about 250 words, write about the benefits of recreational camping with a tiny trailer." The response is below.
Image from Investopedia
Tiny travel trailers, also known as teardrop trailers, are becoming increasingly popular among campers for several reasons. Here's why they might be a better choice than larger travel trailers:
- Maneuverability: Tiny trailers are much easier to maneuver and park, especially in tight campgrounds or urban areas. This makes them ideal for those who want to explore off-the-beaten-path destinations.
- Fuel Efficiency: Towing a smaller trailer significantly reduces fuel consumption, saving you money on gas and increasing your travel range.
- Lower Cost: Tiny trailers are generally more affordable to purchase and maintain than larger RVs. This makes them a great option for budget-conscious campers.
- Minimalist Lifestyle: Tiny trailers promote a minimalist lifestyle, encouraging you to pack lightly and focus on the essentials. This can lead to a more peaceful and stress-free camping experience.
- Easier Setup: Setting up a tiny trailer is quick and easy, often requiring minimal effort. This means more time enjoying the outdoors and less time fussing with camp setup.
While larger travel trailers offer more amenities and space, tiny trailers provide a more flexible, affordable, and eco-friendly camping option. If you're looking for a hassle-free and enjoyable camping experience, a tiny travel trailer might be the perfect choice for you.
- Unique Camping Experience: Tiny trailers offer a unique and adventurous camping experience. They allow you to explore remote areas and immerse yourself in nature without sacrificing comfort.
The article also provided highlighted content that included additional quoted information from five other websites, providing links to the original websites. All in all, the short article was an impressive, concise compilation of information. The article was organized well, its grammar and punctuation were according to standards, and based on my six years of tiny trailer research, the information was accurate.
So the question is--what's lacking? I've thought about this a bit, off and on for a few days until I could get time to write this article. I think that what was lacking was human experience. The article was written in an objective, technical writing style, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, the lack of a human being behind the writing was evident to me. I didn't feel any life experience behind the information.
The interesting thing is that Gemini said that if I wasn't satisfied with the result to include further instructions or even examples of the writing style I was looking for. I didn't take the time to do that, and in future experiments, I will take more interaction time to see what results I achieve.
As a tiny trailer camping blogger, I can say that the AI article included material that I've included in articles I've written--essential information on the basic question of why to camp in a tiny trailer. If I had allotted myself the time to interact with Gemini to attempt a more personal writing style, could I have achieved that? That's something that I hope to report back on sometime.
As a career writing teacher, I found this AI exercise interesting. This computing capability is not going to go away. I believe as a research and writing aid, AI writing composition is here to stay. As writing teachers, I think the task will be to teach writing as a learning tool. That old writing truism that we write not to just share what we know but also to discover what we know is applicable to AI writing. Having AI write for us is not a process that will lead us to moments of self-revelation; it will not clarify our thinking or lead us through stages of understanding on a subject like writing can do. Writing as self-expression, whether it be creative or informative, will always be highly personal. This will be an angle for teaching writing--what's inside that craves to be shared?
Some writing in the future might be an amalgam of AI and individual writing. For instance, could I take the AI writing above, have Gemini tweak it some, and then take those efforts and include my own thinking and experience? Could I consider the AI writing just part of the drafting process? I suppose I could. Time might be an interesting factor to consider--how much time to provide the AI with specifics as opposed to just knocking it out myself. And if we're writing about something that we are emotionally invested in, that first impulse of creativity, whether fiction or non-fiction, is a key element in any creation. Turning it over to AI could lessen the sense of creative achievement.
I wonder if a sculptor drew some rough sketches, provided some written instructions and images from art history as examples, and then told the AI robot, "You knock out eighty percent of the statue, and then I'll finish the rest." Would the sense of achievement be the same? Would the sense of artistic ownership be the same? Is towing my little trailer with my pick-up the same adventure as pulling a Conestoga wagon or bike-packing or backpacking? They would all certainly be different experiences, same road, different experiences.
I'm not going to try to solve this big ideas, but I do think that considering consciousness is important. If we consider the three-in-on experience of knowing or perception--the knower; the process of knowing; and the object of knowing (the known), then the existence of AI certainly impacts the process of knowing or perception, if not the knower or the known. With 3-D printers, we can already copy objects or produce objects from specific instructions. However a totally revolutionary idea or creative artifact?
The creative process, be it whatever blend of intellect and emotion, is an organic process, one often begun without any clear goal, achievement, or artifact in mind. I'm not sure how our AI machines will fit into the very human process of learning and creating. I do know, though, after mulling over and writing about my reaction to this experiment with AI writing, that one thing has become clear to me: human intelligence and artificial intelligence are two separate beasts that are connected. As William Wordsworth so famously said in his poem "My Heart Leaps Up": "The Child is the father of the Man." Howsoever artificial intelligence is not a child whose heart will leap with a natural appreciation or reverence for nature's beauty, it is nonetheless at this time a machine that can perfectly write 250 accurately bland words about tiny trailer camping.
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