Is AI Good for ADHD or Just a Distraction?
In which Douglas proves he’s not a Boomer
I’ve been rethinking my engagement with AI recently. I’m too eager to be an unpaid beta tester for these guys.
Companies that have invested billions into AI will gaslight us all day about how imperative AI tools should be in our lives. They’ll force us to deal with their AI, replace perfectly useful services with AI, and cram AI down our throats every time we turn around. (Microsoft 365 Copilot, I’m looking at you.)
So what good is AI? Judging by how much trouble it gives me, I’d be tempted to say “not much”. ChatGPT once formatted CSS tables so poorly for me that I spent longer fighting with it than I did just coding them myself. Grok often hallucinates answers, gaslights me until I call it out, then it apologizes and gives me the information that I wanted.
Just tonight I asked Siri how many kids Ronald Reagan had and what were their names (since his oldest son passed away today), and it told me “five”, but withheld the names. ChatGPT told me “four” but provided four of their names. Only Grok gave me all the information and mentioned that one of the children died at birth and wasn’t usually included in the lists of his children. That’s a lot of work to go through for accessing supposedly cutting edge intelligences. It would have been quicker accessing the info on Wikipedia. I’ve had problems with Claude and Gemini, too.
It’s fascinating to me that I am so enamored with technology that I’ll get caught up trying to make something work the new way while slowly putting my blood on boil. Perhaps it’s just plain ole ADHD tunnel vision at work. You know, tunnel vision just like regular folk experience, but on steroids.
For whatever reason, the things that I want AI to do for me give them trouble. Then I’ll become side-tracked by the struggle to get the AI to comply. That’s why I’ve decided to change how I approach all AI. It’s just not ready yet. So instead of struggling to get AI to understand my prompts—triggering my low tolerance for frustration—I’ll think of a project or task that I want AI to help me with, then plan a specific way for AI to make that more efficient.
After all, if I wanted to design a poster in Adobe Photoshop, I’d sketch out my ideas beforehand, then turn to Photoshop when I had a clear vision for the project. I wouldn’t prompt Photoshop to do the work for me, then expect the output to be exactly what I had in mind. Therein lies madness.
My interest in AI is to find a digital assistant that makes my work easier. I believe that this is an exciting time, and despite artificial idiocy, we’ll arrive on the other side of this worldwide beta test with useful tools to improve our lives. Most of my friends don’t have the patience for it, but some of my daughters rely on it deeply. We’re looking at a generational gap in the making. Gen X spent so many years laughing at how inept their Boomer parents were with the technology of the past 20 years, but AI has come to make Boomers of them all.
Meanwhile, I promise myself to stop shaking my fists at the cloud and figure out how to utilize AI to keep myself organized and productive.
~Dˢ
