Question of the Week: Have You Benefited From AI?
It’s time for the first Question of the Week of 2026!
This week’s question: have you, personally, derived any benefits or experienced any negatives from the rise of generative AI?
The question was inspired by my recent post about William Miller and AI hyperbole.
I should note that this is a contentious topic with divergent opinions, so it would be good to remain civil in the comments.
For myself, I’ve mostly experienced negative things and a few positive things, though to be honest both the positive and negative things were relatively minor. So I shall list off the pros and cons of my experiences with generative AI.
I should mention that none of my books, short stories, for-sale audiobooks, or book covers contain any AI elements. If it says “Jonathan Moeller” on the cover and it’s not on YouTube (see below) then it is 100% human-made.
Now the pros and cons!
The Pros:
-PowerDirector 365, the video editing program I use for YouTube, has an “animated by AI” feature, so I’ve used it to animate some of my book covers for use as Facebook ads, with middling results.
-I used Google’s Voice AI stuff to create AI-voiced versions of the SILENT ORDER books and put them on YouTube because I wanted to understand the technology. I’m not planning to ever do actual audiobook versions of SILENT ORDER since they wouldn’t make back any money, so I wasn’t screwing a narrator out of work, and the voices involved were licensed by Google, so there was no copyright infringement the way there is with companies like Anthropic. That said, I suspect this is less “generative AI” and simply a more advanced text-to-speech technology, which has been around forever. I mean, ideally I would like text-to-speech to be just a button in your ereader app of choice for accessibility reasons, and then you can purchase the audiobook if the text-to-speech is too bland.
Overall, a lot of people listened to the AI versions on YouTube, but they mostly complained about the synthetic voice and would have preferred a real narrator.
The Cons:
-Facebook ads went from very effective to middling-at-best-on-a-good-day thanks to their Advantage+ AI.
-I am constantly bombarded by AI-generated scam emails of several different varieties (I deleted twelve before I posted this).
-The price for Microsoft Office went up.
-The price for RAM and GPUs went up due to data centers hoarding them all.
-The price for electricity has gone up.
-Windows 11 & Microsoft Office performance has gone down due to forced AI integration. In fact, I got so annoyed at Windows 11 I switched to writing on a Mac Mini. Which I suppose was a positive because I like it, but still.
-Google search, and all Google products in general, are much less useful because of AI.
-The quality of information on the Internet (already low) has gone down due to the prevalence of AI slop.
Admittedly, neither these pros or cons are majorly serious to me personally, with the possible exception of electricity prices, but the cons definitely outweighs the pros. I can confidently say I have derived no real benefit from generative AI.
-JM
I have not used AI for privat purposes. My CON: my Chromebook might be obsolet rather sooner than later.
In my company we use an AI, which is helpfull: it got all the knowledge articles, so you can ask: how do I do this or that.
Company`s CON: laptop prices going up
The Pros:
– Using AI Deep Learning networks for image classification (Inception) and object detection (YOLO) our agriculture thinners and weeders have become far more capable, one example being able to thin and weed red leaf vegetables like red lettuce, red chard and red kale in red dirt. This has allowed us to build and sell millions of dollars worth of equipment while driving down the cost of vegetables.
– AI programming support has saved me hundreds of hours over the last year alone. After writing a prompt in a couple of minutes, a few dozen to a few hundred lines of code are created by AIs in seconds, and while it still has to be tested and is not always right, that’s true of my code as well.
– AI search, engineering, image creation and writing support has saved me dozens of hours over the last few months in creating proposals and talks for various clients (existing and prospective) and other groups. Keep in mind that I carefully review final drafts before I allow those to go out.
– I have been very entertained by the images and videos that I’ve been able to create using AI that I’ve been able to post to X or just email or text to friends and family or just for my own amusement.
– I’ve learned a tremendous amount from some of the political and economic chats I’ve had with various AIs.
– I’m having AI write a book (fiction) for me (with me, really). It’s true that it’s not (technically) copyrightable, but considering that I don’t have the capability to write a book on my own I wouldn’t be able to sell it anyway, I don’t care – I find the process itself is very intriguing.
Cons:
– None, but I am baffled with some of JM’s cons:
— Electricity cost increases: total data center usage percentage in North America is about 4% which includes more than just AI so why not blame the other 96+% for increases in electricity costs?
— Price of GPUs went up: the GPUs I use are generally what are called “edge” processors because they work in a robot or machine operating in real time at the edge of the Internet with often limited access. In our agricultural products, we’ve gone through several generations of edge GPUs: TX2, Xavier, Orin, Thor. While Thor IS more expensive on a per unit basis than TX2, it’s also 200 times faster, so on a cost per computation basis, I’ve seen nothing but collapses in GPU costs.
— Scam emails: Do you not use a spam filter? They work quite well.