skyler_craig•17d agoMost Upvoted

The retired librarian who showed me an AI search tool last Tuesday

I was at a coffee shop in Portland when this older woman sat next to me and started telling me about a free AI tool she used to find old newspaper articles from the 1800s. She showed me how it pulled up a digitized local paper from 1887 in about 15 seconds, something she said would have taken her weeks of microfiche work back in her day. Have you had a moment where someone outside the tech world showed you an AI trick that totally changed how you do something?

2 comments

2 Comments

baker.phoenix17d ago

A buddy of mine named Dan had a total "oh duh" moment last month. His 70 year old neighbor, a retired seamstress, showed him how she uses a free AI photo restoration tool to fix up old family photos from her wedding that were all faded and torn. She walked him through how she uploaded a picture of her grandparents from the 1940s and the AI filled in the missing parts like magic. Dan told me he was blown away because he always figured AI was for coding or writing emails, not for mending memories. @oliver242 that voice to text story you shared reminds me of how Dan said the seamstress lady never touched a smartphone until two years ago but now she runs circles around him with these tools. It's wild how people just find their own ways to make this stuff work for them.

oliver24217d ago

Ha, funny you mention that. My grandma's neighbor, a retired mechanic in his 80s, showed me how he uses voice-to-text to dictate his memoirs because his hands shake too bad to type. It changed how I think about accessibility features. I always figured that stuff was for power users or younger folks. Now I set it up for my own parents and it makes a huge difference in their daily computer use.