Embracing AI: The machine has speed. I have standards. | Opinion - Tallahassee Democrat

Embracing AI: The machine has speed. I have standards. | Opinion

There is no dignified way for a retired professor to admit that he spent part of his summer arguing with an AI chatbot about white space.

Yet there I was — informing a machine that its title page was crowded, that a disclaimer had appeared twice, and that the body of a booklet had reached Edition Six while the cover remained marooned at Edition Five.

I found this reassuring. It meant I still had a job.

I began using AI in retirement the way I have always worked: with projects that start modestly— “let’s improve this little article”—and end with tables of contents, diagrams, and strong opinions about margins. Soon I began submitting supposedly finished work to a fresh AI conversation so the machine could not grade its own homework, a practice no more reliable among computers than it was among my students.

The cardinal rule emerged quickly: fluency is not truth. AI can deliver an error in prose so smoothly that it feels impolite to correct. The language is confident. The manners are excellent. But the fact remains wrong.

Wanting to understand the technology rather than merely use it, I went back to school in my 70s—or, more precisely, to its modern online equivalent—and began intensive AI study through Coursera.

I learned that “improve this” is not really an instruction. Improve it for whom? Shorter? Clearer? More rigorous? A vague prompt generally produces a vague answer wearing a necktie.

That experience changed how I think about older adults and AI.

Age does not guarantee judgment. But experience can provide context: enough to ask whether an answer merely sounds impressive or is right; enough to notice what has been omitted; enough to recognize when a technically correct solution is practically absurd.

Those habits matter because AI offers older Americans both promise and peril: the same technology that can help someone remain safely at home can also summon the cloned voice of a frightened grandchild asking for money.

The good news: Tallahassee is not starting from zero. The Senior Center has introduced older adults to AI and scam awareness; Leon County’s SafeSense teaches digital safety; the public library has offered AI in Everyday Life at several branches; FSU’s OLLI has offered AI courses; and Geeks & Gramps pairs younger volunteers with older adults who would rather not be defeated by a password reset. The key opportunity now is to deepen what is already working—to make practical, hands-on AI education more structured, widely available, and routinely offered across the city and county.

Tallahassee should help older adults become not merely safer around AI, but confident, discerning, and capable users of it.

New technology does not retire old-fashioned judgment. It makes judgment more valuable.

I am not using artificial intelligence to avoid thinking. I am using it to extend the distance I can think.

AI can suggest where to place the semicolon. I still decide whether the sentence deserves to continue.

Wilbur I. Smith, a retired professor of accounting at Florida A&M University, is a Tallahassee resident who has spent recent months studying and working with generative artificial intelligence. He acknowledges using generative AI tools to research the topic and to critique and revise this column.

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