I recently started using ChatGPT. One of my overall rules for life is Stay relevant. Embrace learning new things. So along those lines. I explored the wonders of ChatGPT.

My Jiminy Cricket kept chirping in my ear about the ethics of using AI.

Isn’t using ChatGPT like using a thesaurus? Isn’t using ChatGPT like using a ghost writer? Isn’t asking ChatGPT to rewrite like asking my roommate who is an English major to proof read my essay before I turn it in?

I like how my chatty new AI friend rewrites my rambling sentences. I like how it uses powerful language. I like how it adds a few descriptors here and there to change the tone of my writing.

Well, just when I was getting comfortable with interacting with this artificial intelligence. Just when I was getting familiar with the prompts. Just when that pesky cricket on my shoulder turned his moral homilies  down a notch. ChatGPT goes down!

ChatGPT going down is like the power going out after a heavy storm.

Where I live just last week, trees fell right out of the ground and blocked the roads taking power lines with them on their way down to the saturated, rain-soaked ground. After a whole month of weekly heavy rain storms, the trees’ shallow root systems just couldn’t cling onto the dirt and those woody giants tumbled across roads with no regards to traffic.

An amazing thing happens every time trees fall over and block the road, as if by magic, F-150s and Dodge Rams appear on the road. Men and boys pull out their power saws and before long the road is cleared. 

Everyone in my neighborhood pulls out their gas-driven generators to power their freezers and avoid a loss of food supply.

I sit on my porch sipping my coffee over ice, listening to loud thrum of the generators, the song of summer after a storm.

I ponder.

My brain is like those boys in their pickups and power saws. My thinking process is like my neighbors who pull out their generators when the power goes out.

I can think. I can write. I can create. I can problem solve.  With ChatGPT or without.

Your brain is enough.