Beachcombing – ChatGPT

They say that the happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day that they buy it and the day that they sell it. After 35 years of using commercial office space, that saying applies to Beachcomber as well.

Blame it on the pandemic. We learned that the 15 or so (non-delivery) people who participate in each issue of this newspaper work from home, me included. Even our journalism interns will interview for the position via a Zoom session, and we rarely meet personally, unless they would like some tutoring on some of our software programs. But that too can be performed using the share mode within Zoom.

In Los Angeles County the office vacancy rate is 24.5% and in downtown Los Angeles, it’s 31%. So, it was no surprise that the nice 7-story building at Anaheim Street and PCH (across the street from our former office) is slated to become student housing for CSULB. Our building had an entire floor emptied last year when many of the Cambrian Homecare offices moved to Spring and Temple, next to the airport.

In August we unloaded four rooms of office furniture without breaking into a sweat. The trick is to advertise the items at low cost or free. Recipients provide the labor and transportation to receive their new-found treasures.

I used Facebook’s Marketplace and Craigslist to promote the product’s availability, receiving dozens of inquiries.

We also learned about fraud. If an item was listed at a few hundred dollars, the fraudsters would meet your price and add more “for your trouble” in waiting for their “cashiers check” to arrive by mail. Extra money would be included for you to pay their moving company. This is the part where the unknowing seller gets screwed.

One scumbag sent a $2,990 business check (not cashier, via Priority Mail) from a Louisiana company to cover my $420 price for our beautiful reception desk. I called their bank and learned that the check was good; they called their customer to learn that it was a forgery. I kept the check as evidence.

The bottom line is to always know your customer. The hoaxer will provide a fake name and email address, but never a phone number, personal ID card or company name. Craigslist seems to be a hotbed for this type of activity and publishes details of the various types of scams online.

My son, Jeff, is planning to establish a basketball training program locally and showed me a couple of logos that he created using ChatGPT online. I was impressed!

Researching this program, I learned that GPT stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer. “It describes the core AI technology that powers ChatGPT and other similar models, where ‘Generative’ means it creates human-like content, ‘Pretrained’ means it was extensively trained on vast amounts of text data before deployment, and ‘Transformer’ refers to the specific deep learning architecture it uses to process and understand language context.”

I tried it to create a humorous family logo using the phonetic spelling of Beeler. Then I decided to create a personal logo. Next, I fed the program my Beachcomber “hat” photo to create the colored, caricature image that is shown above.

Finally I created a Jaybird cartoon to replace our aging supply of Paul White cartoons. Now we can make comments on social happenings and all that craziness some politicos conjure up.

One can fully understand why all the creative types are up in arms over a device that can reduce hours of work. ChatGPT is not perfect and requires a knowledgeable user to train the program at various stages. Artificial intelligence can be a great tool, but its weakest point is the application of personal experience that comes with many years in any profession.

publisher@beachcomber.news