19
Oct, 2025

AI, a blessing or a curse?

Inleiding

Artifical Intelligence, we hear the word everywhere, everyone is talking about it and every company has to integrate AI in their work, no matter if that is useful or not. What do I think about that myself? Below you can read my honest opinion (anno October 2025)

AI = machine learning

AI, or what was called “machine learning” before, exists already long. I remember from a long time ago that machine learning was applied to reach specific goals. In such case, you don’t tell the computer “if this happens, then you need to do that” but you feed the computer a whole series of examples of situations or applications so it can use that to calculate what would be the result, without explaining how it came to that conclusion… and as a result without giving us a chance to verify if this is correct! And exactly that is for me the danger as I like to verify things, so I know what I base my idea or an opinion on.

What for? And what not for?

I do think the application of machine learning of AI for specific goals is still very relevant, based on a clearly defined scope and with a clear verifiable knowledge-input, the system will just continue and generate the logical result. Because the input can be verified, I would dare to trust that the output is also pretty good, but then came our friends of OpenAI. Basing themselves on “everything they could find on the internet”, they built a language model (as all of this “knowledge” is still based on words of which the computer has no clue what they actually mean) and whatever you ask, the system will think of an answer. Think of, which means that also without the right data, it will produce something, or it will paste things together that don’t belong together at all, just to generate an answer… the so-called “ghosting”. And where the this can give funny and original results in creating a poem about a certain subject, it is obviously less ideal to represent facts. As a science-adept (where knowledge is based on experience, testing and verification), I really don’t think this is a good evolution. On top of this, Google was caught on speed by OpenAI, so they had to rush to put their model (with the same flaws) live, with all consequences as a result. Google is thé source of info from the majority of our population and they give by default AI-results on top of searches, so everyone thinks this is correct. Few will actually verify the answers (even if there are sources displayed) as Google will be correct, won’t it? Personally, I often try to verify the answers through the links that come with them and sadly, I have to conclude in more than half of the cases that the result is not (completely) correct. When I asked which restaurants served vegetarian dishes, I got a promising list of places but most of them didn’t serve what was being said and some of the displayed restaurants didn’t even exist, typical ghosting as linguistically all seemed fine!

The result is that many people will accept half truths and where this is mainly annoying when looking for a restaurant, it can be problematic for important subjects. Doctors already have the problem that people checked Dr. Google and think they already know the answer, but if it will assign diseases based on language, without scientific basis (since certain symptoms can be attributed to many diseases), it could potentially become dangerous. On a weekly basis, I hear people saying “ChatGPT told me that…”, unfortunately without adding “and I verified and it seemed to be correct”, people will out of ease ask a question and accept the answer, both in ChatGPT as in Google. Agentic AI is the new holy grale as we don’t even have to do anything with the results anymore, the computer will do it for us. If we’ll all be happy with the hotel which AI booked for us, is still to be seen, but at least we can hide behind AI since we didn’t take that foolish decision, it was the computer…

Sometimes, I’m nostalgically thinking back to the time where we had to look in several articles or on serveral websites to find the answer. Much more difficult and time-consuming, completely agree, but the source of the information was immediately a measurement of the trustworthiness of the result!

Where will it end?

At the moment, we’re still in a “race to the top”, everyone wants to launch as many new AI-things as possible, launch new models (no matter if they work good or not, that’s not important), the more the better. Personally, I think (or should I say “I hope”) that the many problems, incorrections, ghosting etc will lead to unhappy users and that the aim for the highest quantity will be replaced by the highest quality. New systems in which the level of accuracy is a factor and which maybe say “I don’t know the answer, but please come back soon as I will probably have more data to answer this question”. Or who knows, maybe there will be an AI-system that would go search for specific, trustworthy sources, to come to an answer with a solid foundation? We can only dream, right?

12
Oct, 2025

A long distance relationship, something for everyone?

Intro

Usually, I’m writing my blog posts about lighter subjects like language or traffic and usually they are in Dutch, since that’s my mother tongue. But a little over 14 months ago, I started the adventure of my life with a wonderful, not (yet) Dutch-speaking girl, so let me share my feelings about this via this English-written blogpost!

Finding the right person

People that know me, are aware of my interest in people of different cultures on one side and the fact that I had some trouble to find someone that matched me, my energy and my personality on the other side. Still, what happened to me, was nothing I planned or expected to happen. Being a person of the current, digital age, I used an online platform to meet interesting (in my case feminine) people. After countless shorter or longer conversations that didn’t end in the right way, there was a girl from 9000km away that said “Hello”. Seen the distance, my hopes were not too high, but her bio was interesting so I wanted to know more about her. What a pleasant surprize was this, she seemed to meet every expectation I had, she was always cheerful and kind, could cope with my energy and was genuinly interested in me! 😍

The first months, from virtual to physical

The difficulty of getting to know each other over a longer distance is that the usual meeting (or date) after some period of talking, is not possible. Luckily, we were both pragmatic people, so we just replaced that with virtual talks! I’m known to like long talks about anything and everything, from the weather, food and local news to deeper subjects like our feelings and relationships of all kinds. And again, I found thé perfect talking partner, since she liked to talk about everything I proposed and she brought many subjects of her own! The result was that in the first 3 months of virtual conversations, we got to know each other soo well, that she was no longer a stranger, despite the fact we never met in person.

Of course, also for us it was important to have some perspective on meeting each other in real life, so it took about a month before we started talking about a travel together. We booked our tickets (for another 2 months later), looked for a good hotel together and started to plan the trip, talking about it a lot until the day of meeting had finally come! The expectation was that meeting in person would not feel too awkward and it was as hoped: it felt totally comfortable for both of us to be together! We had the feeling we were travelling with a friend, making it a very nice trip on which we could enjoy culture, food and most importantly: each other’s company. 👫🏻

Since our first holiday together, things have only gone better! She visited me in the meantime, I’m travelling to her home in a couple of weeks and in between, we’re video calling every day, making plans for the future. 💕

Sounds great, something for everyone?

While in our case, everything is going in a good direction, I can imagine this would not be something everyone would feel comfortable with. Replacing physical meetings by virtual talks, missing being physically together can be (and in our case also sometimes is) something hard to cope with! The main advice I can give is to manage your expectations well, as you know that “jumping on a plane to see each other” is not realistic and you have to be aware of the rollercoaster of emotions you are confronted with. You still have your life, family and work to deal with on a daily basis so you can’t just sit and wait until you see each other again. There are events, big and small, on which you wished you were together but which are in the best case something you witness via video, and often even just via a nice photograph and written explanation. Oh, and in our case the time difference, 5-6 hours (depending on DST), is something to keep in mind as I wake up when it’s noon for her and she goes to bed when it’s late afternoon for me… so the window of possible talks is shorter than we would both wish for!

But all of that is worth it, as we work towards something together! I could not be in such a relationship if it would not be with a common goal, in our case to live together in the not-too-far future! And that’s the thing to take energy from, the idea that your time together will come, that you will be physically together soon, making up for all the times you had to be physically separated… ❤️

Conclusion

I wouldn’t want it any other way! This came on our path and we jumped in it together, making this relationship the best I could wish for! We’re patiently waiting until we can be reunited again, isn’t that a sign of true love? 🥰