A bit of a break from the Alice in Wonderland theme.

Today I am going to take inspiration from Little Shop of Horrors.

Fun fact, this was among Jack Nicholson’s first movies. This was 1960, far before it was turned into a musical.

It was a horror movie about a hapless florist clerk who finds and is bamboozled by a strange plant that demands blood as its source of energy. He goes to great lengths to feed the plant, including killing his boss and his crush’s abusive boyfriend.

There was a Broadway musical that spawned a movie musical that starred Rick Moranis as the hapless, helpless, murderous Seymour. And Steve Martin is the abusive boyfriend who is killed, not by Seymour, but by huffing nitrous oxide.

It remains one of my favorite movie musicals and I listen to the soundtrack while I do yardwork.

When ChatGPT ignited the AI craze in November 2022 everyone went nuts. It was AI this and AI that. In some aspects, it still is.

My classmates and I had discussions about the ethical use of AI in colleges and its applications for students. My professors had frank discussions with us about the possible use of AI and the definite downfalls of it. And rules that had to be rushed into being around the use of AI.

Here’s the thing about AI. I consider it a fancy search engine. Powered by many, many, many gigawatts. And many many internet searches and data that is already out there. Which is why we are feeding the AI. Like Seymour was feeding Audrey 2.

Is it an achievement? Yes.

Did they “teach” the AI by feeding it all the contents of the internet? Yes.

Did they “teach” the AI to be selective in what is used as the source material? No.

Like so many things, garbage in, garbage out.

It wasn’t long before there were reports of the AI “hallucinating” and having nonsense as its output. Which led to more places banning it, even while the mania was just getting underway.

Today the world is still manic for AI. With a large, large, large caveat. A caveat emptor, if you will.

Buyer beware.

There are some useful avenues of AI in the classroom and some programs are actively embracing it.

You just have to be careful of the output. You don’t really know if what AI wrote is nonsense. Sometimes it is. And the teachers know when you’ve used AI.

Especially if the output references something that doesn’t exist. It’s just the universe hallucinating.

But be careful.

And don’t let AI become so much of a crutch that the world ceases to think for itself.

Don’t let AI be the plant that devours creativity and humanity’s sense of self.

Or, like the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, society might end up being fed to the AI who is ALWAYS hungry.