Trying to Learn to Learn like AI Learns

Ovidia--Every other Tuesday

I've always found it difficult learning things that intimidate me--and it doesn't help that most things I don't understand do intimidate me. And one of the things I find most intimidating these days is AI.

After all I come from the generation that learned to write with pencils and erasers, not to mention grinding our own ink sticks in ink stones for ink to use in our Chinese calligraphy!

I liked the grinding of ink (you put water in the ink well, then rubbed the ink stick round and round till the ink was dark enough) a deliciously messy business.

I used to experiment with grinding other things--chalk, charcoal, black rock sugar--to see what colours I could get. But ink sticks were always the best.
Much later I learned more about how those ink sticks were made--the ones we used in school were most likely made of pine ashes, or the coarse leftovers after the refined pine soot was taken to make ink sticks for professional artists and calligraphers.
This pine ash was probably mixed with fish oils and kneaded, pounded and stretched (like dough being prepared for noodles or steamed buns) before being pressed into moulds and dried.

As one of the four Scholars' Treasures (the others being paper, brush and inkstone) we were told to treat our humble ink sticks with respect, however poor our calligraphy was!

My calligraphy was very poor though I loved playing with the brushes. I think much of the problem was, I didn't know what we were aiming to achieve when we were told to practice strokes over and over.
But when you were done and could play before washing up, it was huge fun drawing characters on old newspapers and trying to grind ink to match the same degree of blackness you'd previously used (difficult, because ink always dries a little lighter)
I drew my first stories on paper, because I'd seen comics and picture books. Then later, when I started reading books, I taught myself to type and typed and bound (and illustrated) my stories that way.

Learning to touch type was difficult. And then later, learning to use my first computer wasn't easy either.

And then even after that, learning to use a dial up modem, learning to move on from the dial up modem...

But I realise that the steepest learning curves, the ones that caused most struggle and frustration, were ultimately the most rewarding.

For instance, now I love using Scrivener but there was a time when I felt that if I had to write with it, I would never write again.

Anyway all that has brought me round to thinking I should find out more about using AI.
The Hollywood Writers won us the ruling that writers can use tools like ChatGPT as a tool but studios cannot oblige them to work on AI generated material.

But what I want to learn from AI is how it learns from everything fed into it without worrying whether it's worthy to use it or not.
I've already played around with Procreate (that's how I made the inkstone and ink stick drawing above) but I wanted to step out of my comfort zone--like playing with sound and video.
So I tried to learn by making something from AI tools I found online--Suno, Udio and iMovie-- and made a Murder Is Everywhere scroll ditty. The problem is, it doesn't play in preview so I have no idea whether it's going to work or not till after I post it!
(I'm logging it as Attempt 1. However it turns out, I'll try again after learning more--given how many times I've failed on these so far, one of these programmes might be my next Scrivener!)