AI at Digitalfire

Organizations are increasingly adopting guidelines ensuring the ethical, secure, and responsible use of artificial intelligence within their organizations. Their policies also include data privacy, bias mitigation, human oversight, and accountability, adapting to legal frameworks like the EU AI Act or Canada's AIDA.

Among some craftsmen and artists, there is a deep-seated resentment of A.I. (or more precisely, simulated intelligence). I get it. It feels like we are riding a horse and don't know where it is going! But A.I. tools are invading our lives whether we like it or not. People rail against them on social media (usually a Meta platform like Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp) while not stopping to think that Meta itself is the largest investor in this technology. Many feel that this could be the greatest development in the history of man. It will be used for good, likely much more for evil. Like so many things we've done as humans. Irresponsible and greedy people and companies have hijacked it and are taking outrageous risks in hopes of unprecedented profit. They are likely to go bankrupt. But we will be left with A.I.

I am Tony Hansen. I am Digitalfire.com. I am an explainer. I use A.I. as a tool to enhance my work in a measured way. Audiences have decreasing attention spans and are less inclined to understand the whys and hows of their craft or art. A.I. tools are invaluable to meet this challenge. A.I. scrapers, at times, bog down the servers with dozens of requests per second and then use my material to answer questions! So, now I have to worry about AEO instead of SEO. But it is still a tool I need. Over time, I adopted new publishing mediums and technologies as they arrived (e.g. coding, diskettes, desktop publishing, PDFs, CDs, BBSs, MP4s, email, the static web, e-commerce, the data-driven web). For some of these, I faced pushback during their adoption, but I had to press on just to get the work done.

I use A.I. in similar ways to what your doctor, lawyer, insurance agent or car salesman might be doing.

• Philosophers say that the most we can hope to learn in life is how to ask the right questions. I know how to do that, and chatbots help me every day to refine and correct material on Digitalfire.
• A.I. is an idea and plan-making machine. ChatBots correct me in ways that do not offend, they are polite and civil and a delight to work with. Repeatedly, they have shielded me from going down pointless paths.
• Refinement of titles and text in posts and articles.
• Fix grammar, spelling and tone in text.
• A.I. tools help me discover things that I overlook (especially when dealing with troubleshooting issues in ceramics). Modern tools have stunning abilities to analyze photos and pick out important details.
• A.I. tools provide a fast track to my learning, making it possible to do things that would otherwise be impractical.
• I use elevenlabs.io speech-to-speech conversion to generate audio that perfectly synchronizes with video.

Programming: Modern coding tools are astonishing. They have converted computers into devices that deeply understand English and have coding abilities of a PhD programmer. They are not just plagiarizing code found online. Tools like Codex and Claude Code can scan my code and spot all manner of issues. They not only recommend the fixes, but can do them for me! They make mistakes, admit it, and backtrack. They learn my style over time and raise alarms when I diverge from it. They accept my way of doing things and help me improve gradually. I pay extra for tools that treat me in a kind and civil manner; it is an absolute delight to work with them. Almost every day, I have to get up from my chair and walk around the room in absolute awe at this! How is this even possible? It is tremendously empowering. I can even program in languages I don't typically use; the code written is simple enough that I can understand it. If I don't, it has endless patience for questions. Nothing in life has prepared me for this. Code is the center of everything in this world now; toasters and space stations have circuit boards that have to be programmed. But like others, I shudder at the thought that evil people also have these tools.

Some of my photos are made or adjusted using A.I., below are some examples:

• When an idea needs to be conveyed, there is no substitute for the right picture. Social posts require pictures. I most often have a picture. But sometimes I either don't or the one if have is just not as good as can be created by Gemini or ChatGPT (when I do that I show the prompt used to make the photo).
• Assistance in creating photos (the mug below is from a low-resolution photo which only showed part of it against a cloth background; the A.I. completed the mug, put it in the hand and removed the background). Some of my A.I. created photos are awaiting replacement as real ones become available.

A.I. created the hand, upscaled the picture and removed the background.

A.I. created this porcelain bowl with layered iron red and rutile blue glazes. This will be replaced when a photo becomes available.

Danny Downsized was drawn by an artist, the factory by ChatGPT and the sign by us.

A.I. made this in response to a prompt to create a coffee mug with a shape having inherent strength to keep it from warping to oval during firing. We made a mold based on this.

Google Gemini removed the red lines; all it took was an upload and a simple request.

I uploaded the yellow mug to Google Gemini and it removed the background, inserted it here and generated this bone china teacup (it even handled the lighting and shadows).

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