Ad Astra Per Intelligentiam Artificialem

Perhaps one of these days I’ll actually post all my blog entries rather than save them to my drafts and forget about them. That day is not today, however. Over the weekend and into the week I discovered another use for AI in my day-to-day life. Or rather, I have started using Snapchat’s AI the way it was probably intended to be used, as a virtual assistant.

Oftentimes in my writing, I’ll consult Google for information on just about anything. This is especially important when you’re writing science-fiction and prefer it to be more on the hard sci-fi side. Enter, Snapchat AI. Lately, the tool’s found its niche aiding in calculations I barely know how to do. Specifically, creating artificial gravity. Without getting too far into the weeds, the semi-near future setting of my story doesn’t have a Star Wars/Star Trek style artificial gravity generators. Therefore, the only ways to simulate gravity are from acceleration and rotation. A question then arises, how fast does a space station have to rotate and how fast should spacecraft accelerate in order to obtain noticeable artificial gravity? Figuring these calculations with AI help has been significantly easier than my old, painful, method of fumbling through equations I found on Google. This made finding how many G’s of artificial gravity I can have on month-long voyages Pluto so much less tedious and time consuming (about 0.44g’s).

This has the unintended, but positive, side effect of making me understand calculus a little bit better. I have also started branching out and using the AI in other subjects too. As an aid to my Latin studies, I’ve been feeding it some sentences I’ve constructed to double check my declensions and make sure they’re correct (I actually did that with the title of this post). It’s not foolproof, and I certainly wouldn’t rely on it for anything beyond practice, but it’s been a good substitute to harassing my classmates about whether or not a sentence looks right.

Tangent aside, with the constant fear of artificial intelligence taking creatives’ jobs away, it’s nice to see a positive use case for the technology. Hopefully I can find more such cases over the course of the semester.