What a Concept

An old friend came to visit last night, a very smart and tech savvy person who, learning about our fledgling YouTube and blog efforts, introduced us to a miracle of technology called AI Chatgpt. This little tool of wizardry can create a blog about literally anything, write code to create a website about anything for you without any effort at all on your part, you just tell it what you want it to do and bam, done.

He demonstrated by typing a few sentences into the app asking it to create a blog about traveling from Denver to the Grand Canyon and hiking to the bottom to stay the night. Viola, in 3 seconds AI Chatgpt produced a blog that, quite frankly, is probably better than anything I could ever hope to write describing the journey, scenery, locations and what you need to do to prepare for the trek. The app has never set foot, which it does not have, into the Grand Canyon, where it cannot go, but can vividly describe the ‘experience’ to all. Well, don’t I feel superfluous.

Real experience is completely unnecessary to create content, and so it would seem, are blog writers and vloggers. This program can not only make websites and blogs, it can also produce neat little movies, completely fake, that look completely real about any experience you type into it. He demonstrated before our very eyes the magic of AI by typing in ‘jeep ride through mountains’ and up popped a movie that looked completely like a real jeep ride through the mountains, without anyone actually spending hours getting to the mountains, hours actually jeeping through the mountains, hours catching camera shots and video, then hours downloading and editing video to produce the same type of 5 minute clip that AI made in seconds. At this point, the evening became kind of depressing.

So, why have a blog, YouTube channel, Photo page of your travels and experiences at all? Why not just let AI invent a digital world for you and save yourself the effort?

I’ll tell you why, because AI can’t describe how it FEELS to be a human immersed in a real-world experience. AI doesn’t have a stomach, so it can’t tell other humans about the frilly sensation your stomach experienced when the Jeep you were riding in climbed up the vertical incline of that giant rock and how wonky it made your head feel to be moving up that incline in that vehicle and seeing only sky through the windshield. AI has no nose, so it can’t describe the way pine needles scented the cool mountain air in a way that made you want to inhale and inhale until you felt lightheaded. AI can tell you that the climb up the canyon or mountain is challenging but can’t describe the specific burning sensation you experience in your thigh muscles or the size of the blisters on your heels, because it has no thighs or heels. The descriptions, the words, the images generated by this technology are wonderful and miraculously fast to produce, but they can’t convey human feelings. If AI develops that trick, then God help us, we are truly useless, might as well throw in the towel and never leave the house again.

So, taking stock this morning of our plans for traveling, living in a van and writing and vlogging about it after last night’s shocking revelations that we can do the same damn thing without ever leaving our living room, I have concluded that it will be worth the journey anyway. Even if NO ONE ever reads a word of the blog, even if NO ONE ever watches a minute of the travel videos, even if the lame, simple website never gets a single view, it’ll be worth it because we will own the experiences we communicate about. If nothing else, when we are too old to travel anymore, we will have this great record of the things we did and can look through the videos and read about them and experience them all over again. When our memories fade, the record will still stand; we did that, and it felt this way.

There are so many people out there making videos about the very thing we want to do. We know because we watch them all the time. The chances of our little internet content taking root and going viral are next to nil, but it really doesn’t matter. We’ll always have it and the people who want to share in the journey with us will have it.

So, all that said, the real update we have to share today is that the concept drawings of our future home are in. It feels very exciting to see the artist’s renderings of our van build vision. It feels great to be one step closer to the life we have been anticipating for so long. We feel like kids waiting for Christmas, which is good and a little torturous, but more good than torturous, because sometimes humans need to savor the wait more than to open the present early.

Seeing the pictures of our van design gives us a feeling we haven’t had since we were young, like we are standing in the doorway of a big, brand-new adventure, just waiting to step out. Top that AI.