[jfengel]

I caught an interesting podcast this morning, about an artist who set out to create her own AI chatbot, with zero programming experience. She went to "a magical place called Github", where the software was provided along with a fair bit of assistance. The input was conversations with her family, which were presumably transcribed somehow. It's unclear how much programming she learned, but she did say that she spent 18 months "tweaking the algorithm".

She did figure out, one way or another, how to cobble together a microphone, speaker, and computer to make a talking chatbot. (Along with a 3D printed case to hold it.)

It wasn't especially good, but I found it remarkable that she was able to put all that together. I'm a professional programmer and that project would take me a while to pull off, just because I'd have to learn the specific technologies. I've actually wanted to do a Shakespeare-generating bot for a while, which should be an introductory project but is rather daunting to begin.

I really like the idea of more people programming. Most of what I do isn't difficult. In particular, I want to see less of a gap between "the programmers" and "the people who actually do stuff". As a programmer, perhaps my greatest skill is not the languages and frameworks and debugging tactics, but my ability to talk to the people who need stuff and quickly learn enough of their needs to help. It would be even better if they could do a lot of it themselves, and bring me in for the hard parts.