Ways that modern technology has impressed me recently

Sometimes I find myself completely taken aback at just how far technology has come on in the last few years. It's not all good of course (AI slop on social media I'm looking at you!), but here are some ways that technology has impressed me.

Helping me to re-read a short story that has stuck with me over the years

I had a memory of a short science fiction story that I read as a teenager and I wanted to identify it.

This was my prompt - I’m looking for a short science fiction story. It was written/set I think maybe 1950s or earlier. It is about a group of men, I think two come to visit a third. During their visit a mysterious gas cloud covers the earth and sends everyone to sleep for a day. The men wear gas masks and don’t fall asleep. They observe everyone else sleeping. Then the next morning everyone else wakes up and doesn’t realise that they have missed a day.

I had quite a few key details wrong (there are four men and a woman, they are in a sealed room with oxygen and not wearing gas masks, it was written in 1913, and they actually assume that everyone else is dead and not just sleeping which is a little more horrifying), but not only did ChatGPT find me the story (The Poison Belt by Arthur Conan Doyle) it also found me an online copy as it is in the public domain. I went over to Amazon, and was able to download a free copy for my Kindle to read straightaway.

Deciphering an inscription from a book

I bought an old book recently with some handwritten text in the front that had been crossed out. Being nosy, I wanted to know what it said! I took a photo and uploaded it to ChatGPT which suggested adjusting the colour contrasts. I discovered that the original text was a different colour to the crossed over text, and so I was able to upload the contrasted image to ChatGPT which isolated the original text for me and filled in the gaps. I was able to work out almost all of the text (it's nothing exciting, just a name and location!)

Checking maths homework

My daughter was recently doing some maths homework, solving a geometry problem. She had a diagram where she needed to find the angles, and she had annotated the original worksheet page quite heavily with her workings out and final answer. She showed me how she could take a photo of the page and uploaded it to ChatGPT asking it to check her answers. It was able to find the key information from the question and confirm that she was right (yes we did double check with our resident maths expert!) 

Finding a short YouTube video that I watched once

I had a memory of a poignant video that I saw once on YouTube and wanted to watch again. All I could remember was that it was animated, and was about a woman's life and the last time that anyone thought about her. I had searched over and over on YouTube and elsewhere and couldn't find it, but ChatGPT found it in seconds. 

Here it is, if I have piqued your interest!

But what has not impressed me?!

I was looking for some new wall art recently, and thought I'd quite like a nice poster of a local town or city. How about Brighton? Well, even if you've never visited Brighton I think that you would quickly realise that this interesting effort, almost certainly AI generated, is not an accurate depiction!

Have you found any ways in which technology has impressed you?