I have some friends who are trying to convert a PDF publication to a digital mark-up language. Yes, I know, we’ve been doing this for decades, and it’s somewhat amazing there isn’t a simple, clean solution yet.
My friends want to use AI, which reminds me of the old saying, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.”
Everybody thinks AI is part of the solution to every problem. It’s not. And this case is a good example.
If you’re trying to convert a PDF into some markup language, a regular computer program is the better choice. You can go into the code and say, ‘When you see this, do this.’ And the program does what it’s told to do.
When you use AI, you don’t know what’s going on. There’s some deep, mystical something-or-other going on behind the scenes that is totally opaque to you. You have no way to look and see exactly what it’s doing, or how it’s processing things.
It might change words on you. If you say, ‘Don’t do this thing,’ it’s not like what you can do with a programming language, which do exactly, precisely what you tell them to do.
AI isn’t like that.
AI has all these internal wheels and mechanisms and rules that you will never understand, and you’ll never be able to get it to do exactly what you want. You’ll always have that level of concern that, ‘Hmm, the AI changed its algorithms, and now it’s doing things differently.’
I use AI all the time. It’s great for certain tasks. But you have to remember that there are some things it’s not good for. And for some things, you should just use a regular, old—old-fashioned computer program, because it’s something that you can control.
Here’s the really smart way to approach this problem. Use AI to help you write the computer program.
