People are scared of artificial intelligence right now — and I get it. The headlines make it sound like machines are about to wake up and take over the world, but that's not what's happening. What's really going on isn't all that mysterious. It's not magic. It's math — a super-powered version of the same technology that's been sitting in your pocket for years.

Think about AutoCorrect or those three words that pop up above your keyboard when you're texting. That's predictive text. It looks at what you've typed and guesses what word might come next. The difference is, your phone is doing it with almost no context — just a few words and whatever it's learned from your typing habits. Artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, does the same thing, only on a much larger scale. It's still guessing the next word, just with a lot more information behind it.

The trick is context. The more information you give it, the better it performs. I've learned that if you tell it exactly what you want, describe it clearly, and give it enough background, it can produce something really impressive. But nothing about it is instant. You don't type a word and get a response in real time — you write a prompt, send it off, and wait while the system does some heavy lifting in a data center somewhere, using an incredible amount of computing power, electricity, and water for cooling.

Computers don't come up with new ideas on their own. They respond to input — to us. That's always been true, and I think it will stay true for a long time. ChatGPT knows my writing style because all of my blog entries are written in the same chat. It has that context. It remembers what I like, how I phrase things, and what tone I use. Without that context, it would just make stuff up — because that's what happens when you ask it to write without enough information.

People are worried that artificial intelligence is going to take all the jobs, but the truth is, the only people who will be left behind are the ones who don't learn how to use it. It's a tool, and it makes you incredibly productive if you know how to use it well. I can do in a few hours what might have taken me six months before. But I'm still essential to the process — without me, it would just sit there, waiting for instructions.

A lot of people are throwing money at artificial intelligence because they don't understand what it is. They're expecting some kind of miracle machine god. It's not that. It's AutoCorrect on steroids. It's amazing, but you shouldn't be confused about what it actually does.

When AI draws a picture of an apple, it's not because it *knows* what an apple is. It's been shown millions of pictures of apples — in different lighting, shapes, and colors — and it's learned what the patterns of pixels look like. It's not knowledge; it's probability. That's why it's called "training."

But if you think about it, we work in a similar way. Our brains are pattern-recognition engines too. When we speak, write, or think, we're just stringing together words and ideas based on what we've experienced before. Maybe intelligence isn't as mysterious as we thought. Maybe what really makes us human is creativity — that spark that lets us imagine something that's never existed before.

Artificial intelligence might be fast, powerful, and eerily good with words, but the computer is still blind. It can't *see* or *feel* or *dream.* That's still our job.