2025- You and the environment is what feeds AI

I know, I know. AI was exciting and the new shiny thing when it bowed into existence in November 2022.

But.

But have you ever wondered what AI gets out of this?

It can make you feel like an artist. It can make you feel like a writer. It can make you feel like the best singer/producer in the world. It can make you feel like the best director of a movie ever!

It can make your appointments and keep your calendar and give your reminders of things.

But it can also steal ideas and already published works. These are video, music, and writing. They call this training the AI and writers and performers and movie companies have no say.

What I want to write about today is the way that you, a regular joe or jane, feeds the AI.

The AI requires VAST amount of energy and water. Lots of water. Millions of gallons of it.

Your data is being compromised and stolen every time you interact with it.

All of it. Your identity.

Your brain (we talked about that last week).

Your ability to engage meaningfully in the world without the AI crutch.

All of this is fed into AI program and repackaged and sold back to you. At a higher cost.

There is definitely a reason for the existence of AI. To crunch the numbers and the existing data that we have on things like cancer rates, medication classes, and it can even see cancers before the human eye can.

AI is meant to serve us.

Instead, we are serving it.

Our attention.

Our time.

Our energy.

Our water.

And ourselves.

On a golden platter.

Because it is the new shiny and you can make a lady picture with 5 breasts.

This is a warning.

Also a reminder to go re-watch the Matrix. Or the Terminator series. But I like the Matrix.

AI is here and thriving.

Because we are its food.

School Me Saturday 8/16/25- AI is Making People Dumber

AI was thrust upon an unknowing public in late November 2022.

All of a sudden AI was EVERYWHERE!

In our search engines. You no longer could run a simple search without AI thrusting itself into the conversation. Uninvited or not. Frankly, it was giving Clippy vibes.

In our “art”. Yes, the quotes are important. Or should it be an asterisk? Also AI art is slop. By that I mean it is crap. Shoddily done, hallucinatory, and ubiquitous. Not to mention obvious.

In our daily planner. Some people began using AI immediately as an assistant. To keep track of their meetings, to bounce ideas off of, and to help write.

Students began using AI to cheat. They didn’t do the assignment. They asked a program, one that has known hallucinatory proclivities (they all do, no matter what people are saying), to write their assignments. And then they were just copy pasting the results into their papers.

When artists and writers objected to their works being used to “train” these large language models, the programmers started to feed the models crap. And the hallucinatory problem got even worse.

And the models started spouting the nonsense it was being fed and some people took that as truth.

I have been invited to use AI to write my thesis. No thank you. The Big Write will be by my own hands and out of my own brain. No large language models needed here.

AI output is only as good as the material that is used to create it. And so much of that is terrible. I would hazard a guess that it is all terrible.

Ooh, you can give a pretend sex doll a third breast. Why not go whole hog and give the bytes four breasts. Or is that too bestiality coded for you?

There is even a name for the phenomenon of the human brain on AI. The phenomenon is split into what the researchers explain are the three main problems.

There is the cognitive offloading. This is when you ask AI to do so many tasks for you, you forget how to do them for yourself. Instead of engaging in the multiple decisions that everyday tasks demand of us, you cede this power over to the machine
There is skill erosion. Simply put this the decreased ability to do the skills that you rely on the program to do for you. Alexa started this cascade. In this the ability to critically evaluate information and come to conclusions is missing.
There are generational gaps. Much like introducing the computer in the 1980s, and the cell phone in the 1990s, and the smart phone in the 2010s, earlier generations who are not born into the AI generation don’t depend on it as much. I have seen this in the subsequent nursing generations. And it is scary how they depend on their AI assisted searches.

All of this results in a population and a generation who is unable to reason, unable to perform simple tasks, and can’t evaluate the results they do get for clarity and for correctness (truth) of the information given.

The best day of the last 6 months was when I found out how to disable the AI search. I taught Chrome how to disengage from AI searching. And I think my searches are better and more complete this way.

This information is from a study as reported by the Forbes Magazine.

School Me Saturday 7/5/25- students and AI part 2

AI is the newest, shiniest tech toy.

Of course companies are falling over themselves to make it available to us, the consumers.

At a premium of course.

But what are the other associated costs?

According to a report from IBM’s Institute for Business Value, the cost to compute (what it costs the company to make AI possible) was expected to climb 89% between 2023 and 2025.

And guess what? They won’t be interested in footing the bill forever. Nothing is free.

Ever.

So they made it ubiquitous. To make us as consumers dependent on AI. So that when costs to the consumer are introduced we will be convinced we can’t live without it.

Goodness knows, students are already dependent on it.

Especially the younger ones.

I know I am not dependent on it. I find output obnoxious and not a plaything. AI isn’t anything that I am curious about. I wanted to find a workaround with search engines so it would NOT give me AI output. I found one. I put -AI in the search bar and about 70% of the time I do not get an AI output. I have also heard putting a curse word in the search string will allow for AI free output, but that is not my experience.

Hell, Google itself is a kind of AI. That is how we get answers so quickly to a search field. But also less than AI because it didn’t suck up all the world’s literature and art to make a large language model.

In last Saturday’s post I wrote about the my personal experiences with AI since ChatGPT was released in 2022. But it goes farther back than that. Much, much further.

In the 1988-1989 school year, I was an eighth grader. There was no cafeteria at our school. Most schools in California don’t have cafeterias. Students gather on the quad, sit on the grass, lean against the trees, roam the campus, or walked home for lunch. Personally that did not interest me, none of the options were appealing. I usually went to the campus library and read. One day, my computer teacher approached me and my friend Aluminum to run simulations in the computer lab during lunch. We jumped at the chance.

After that, I split my time between the library and the computer lab.

In the library I read.

In the computer lab, Aluminum and I were working a machine learning task that the teacher had asked us to do. Basically we played a version of Connect Four with the computer. As I remember, the goal was to see if the computer could be trained to beat us.

I imagine that there were students in computer labs just like us across the country, training the computers to “think”. This was the way that people originally termed artificial intelligence, thinking.

It wasn’t until 1997 that Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in chess. But I think the seeds of this computing marvel was in the computer labs at middle schools and high schools in the 1980s. From my first experience with machine learning to this chess match was less than 10 years.

Look how far artificial intelligence has come in just over forty years. It started with nerd students in the classrooms playing with the computer, teaching it to think.

Oh, boy. Hold onto your hats.

Tuesday Top of Mind 11/19/24-time to raise a little hell

This was not what I was going to write about today. Which I understand is a theme I’ve got going on the last several weeks.

Oopsie.

I decided not to write about the original idea because I wanted something a little lighter. Well, a lot lighter. Also something that might make the reader laugh. Because I laughed so hard.

My phone and I have a love-hate relationship. Yes, it is a technological marvel and holds vast amount of data and lets us engage with the world that before 2007 and the widespread advent of the smartphone. Perhaps my very favorite thing that the phone can do is give me a read-out of who is calling.

I know I am amongst friends when I write that I don’t answer every phone call I receive. Because the spam filter we were promised is crap.

There is no comparison between the calls I doanswer, which are mostly friends and family or the hospital, and the calls that I don’t answer, which are scam alerts, or numbers I don’t know.

Because that is a fabulous thing that the phone can also do; identify known numbers.

I rationalize it by remarking to my phone nearly every time, well, they’ll leave a message or call back. But they don’t. Leave a message, that is. And if they call back at least twice, I am more liable to answer a repeat phone call.

But tonight, tonight I was driving to the hospital to run a call BootCamp with a new nurse when the phone rang.

It surprised me when I answered it. No name, just a phone number. Totally goes against everything I believe in. Wild hair made me do it?

I don’t say hello if it is someone I don’t know. I answer with “This is Kate.” No more, no less. I have read the news reports about what not to say and give up to people you don’t know on the phone. I avoid yes, I avoid hello, and I avoid apologizing.

When the caller stuttered, I said again, “This is Kate.” I am unsure if they were expecting someone to answer the phone or not.

It was a cold call from somewhere in TN. The caller launched into a spiel about an energy-saving program.

I assured them that I had no need for an energy-saving program.

They tried again, asking if our electrical bill was consistently over $100.

I assured them that it was not.

Silence on the other end.

And then a click.

That just tickled me and I laughed at the absurdity.

It was a definite dopamine hit.

I don’t know if readers are aware of the 2024 general election and the general malaise that has come over some of us.

It’s been a rough 10 days.

And if I can get a little joy out of confounding a scam caller, I will absolutely do it.

I kind of can’t wait for someone else to call tomorrow. Just to make them hang up on me.

This might be fun.

____________________________________________________________________

I wrote the bulk of this post last night and here is a little post-script.

It was fun. An AI called my phone looking for my husband.

Same set up-

this is Kate
their question
no
their second question
no
click

Counting Basics #16- stray sponges and instruments

I’ve discussed 15 other types of counting basics. From what is counted, sponges, needles, and others to what happens if there is a miscount. Today I am going to write about the stray sponges and instruments.

One would hope that when a room is opened and prepared for a surgery that there are no stray sponges and instruments. In fact, the patient is depending on the counts being an accurate snapshot of all the countables.

A stray instrument is a not counted instrument. A stray instrument is also an instrument that is just hanging out on the computer desk, or in the marker tray under the white board. Or even used to hang the irrigation fluids. Or in the computer desk drawer.

This instrument is NOT included in the count.

Some of my coworkers call them the bonus instruments.

I call them a liability.

This goes for the sponges that are not included in the count but are just hanging out on the equipment boom, or on the shelves above the computer desk.

Some of this is to be saved for the worker in the room. I know I am of the thrifty sort and put aside sponges that have been passed off and not included in the count. For use at home.

But…

These stray sponges are not to be left in the room for the next surgery.

I’ll type it slowly. This is a liability!

Last week, after I took over for the day shift nurse and completed the surgery, and did the RF wanding (remember that?) prior to the closing of the incision. Like I’m supposed to. Well, when we were taking down the drapes, a raytec was taped over the foley catheter. Why? I don’t know!

But the scrub tech and I both looked at it, knowing full well I had RF wanded the patient not fifteen minutes before. I don’t know how they felt, but I felt sick.

This raytec was definitely not included in the count. We had done a relief count, and a closing count and a skin incision count and all 10 of the raytecs were accountable then.

Mystery sponge.

I will be discussing this with the nurse I relieved. And the manager.

My brain goes straight to the possibilities. None of them good. I cannot be alone in this.

These are new RF machines and apparently they are not as sensitive as the previous ones. I will be testing them this evening when I go into work.

No matter how you describe it, this is scary. And thoughtless. And leaves the previous nurse and tech as open to a lawsuit as myself and the evening tech.

Word to the wise, DON’T DO THIS!

And take the stray sponges and instruments out of the room prior to the surgery. Or count them. I don’t care which. But they have to accounted for. Our patients are vulnerable and they are depending on us to do the right thing.

Being accepting of stray instruments is not the right thing.

Ever.

Let’s talk sterile consciousness-what it is and what it is not

Sterile consciousness is defined as being acutely aware of potential or actual contamination of the sterile field or object and taking steps to remedy the break.

You want surgeries to be as sterile as possible; as a patient, and as a surgical team member. There is a LOT of work done to keep it so.

A break in sterility happens when there is an inadvertant introduction of something non sterile into the sterile field. This can be a tear in the drapes, this can be a puncture from a blade being opened in the wrong area, this can be stray hair in the sterile instrument tray, or when people where their surgical cap in a messy manner with hair hanging out everywhere.

Many things can break the sterile field.

Today, I want to write about the sterile caskets. These are the hard metal containers that the instrument tray is sterilized and stored in. Some of these caskets have single-use filters that must be replaced in the bottom and the top. This is so steam can penetrate the instruments during the steam sterilization process.

You with me so far?

The filters themselves can be inserted incorrectly. There can be missing filters. There can be punctures in the filters from incorrect storage or from loose instruments in the casket. There can be folds in the filters. All of these instances render them unsterile.

If in doubt, sterility has been compromised and another tray must be opened. Hard and fast rule in any of the ORs I’ve worked in.

During the case opening process, the scrub tech does not continue set up and will stand there holding the instrument tray until the filters in the bottom of the casket can be checked for holes. Don’t wander off during this time, your scrub tech will not appreciate it as they are literally left holding the bag.

This next break in sterility has been reported to me. The scrub tech was holding the instrument tray, waiting impatiently for the circulator to reach into the casket, pull out and inspect the filters. Normal right? Yeah, the scrub tech placed the sterile instrument set BACK INTO THE NO LONGER STERILE CASKET and was picking instruments that they wanted out of the tray. No recognition that the entire instrument tray had been contaminated and must be taken away to be re-processed and protesting when the circulator told them it was now contaminated.

That is what I mean about breaks in sterile consciousness.

Don’t do this.

The OR is complicated.

School Me Saturday 12/23/23-where I’ve been and new tool for school

Good morning!

I know, I know. I’ve been very light on posts this week. I blame the December schedule and the hours I picked up to help out. I also blame my old computer which had been limping since I received it in November 2022. It was bought new then to replace the older computer that saw me through the MSN. The computer I used for my BSN had completely fried one day, after the BSN but before I started the MSN. My husband says that although the PhD computer had had good reviews when he bought it there were files that were missing in its programming and after about December there were a lot of bad reviews.

I don’t think I am too hard on my computers. If I were, the computers would die from the same ailments, not different ones each time.

I think it is more that they fail me.

The one this computer replaced, the one I had had barely 12 months, started forgetting all my settings and would routinely dump all my information. This meant I was starting from scratch, with a computer that had to be retaught who I was and how to work best for me.

I admit, it was frustrating.

But having lived through my BSN computer dying and losing aaaaaaallllllllllllllll that work on the hard drive I was more strategic about where I saved my work. Once Microsoft 365 came along and made it easier to save on the cloud, and the computers began to be able to sync to others, recreating my school life, and my work life, and my writing life became a lot easier. This meant that I stopped losing school assignments, personal writing projects, and work writing projects each time the computer either died or had a seizure that made it forget me.

Which is the lesson for this School Me Saturday.

Starting over from scratch on a weekly basis is eminently frustrating. And, frankly, a waste of my time.

The lesson for this week is to have to right tools for the job at hand.

This will look different, depending on the job.

Right now this is a computer that can handle my hours and hours that I spend each week reading and making notes on the class readings. Or the hours and hours I spend each week on assignments.

This new computer is trial. Let us see if it will last through my dissertation.

I hope, I hope it does.

Although everything is in the cloud it is still annoying to bring the computer up to speed every time it decides to dump any knowledge I’ve gathered.

Fingers crossed.