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The smartest way to use AI may not be letting it touch your files, but asking it to write software that handles them safely - in the time it takes to make dinner.
Recently, my wife, Denise, started singing with her church's choir. She has a lovely singing voice. She needed to practice all the new songs. The songs came in booklets, about the size of a trade paperback, printed on yellow paper. She wanted to scan those booklets into her computer as a PDF, remove the color, and reprint them larger, on 8.5-by-11-inch paper so she wouldn't have to wear her reading glasses to see them.
So one afternoon she came to me. She asked how she could remove the yellow background, but preserve the music itself, so that she could print it out without wasting a huge amount of color printer ink. If she printed it out in black and white, she'd still be using a lot of ink to print out a gray background, which would be even harder to see.
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She was also planning to feed the music into PlayScore 2, an app that plays the sheet music so that you can sing along to it. She was concerned the software might not like the background color.
I initially suggested removing the yellow background in Photoshop, but the procedure turned out to be too fiddly. Each image needed slightly different slider settings. It was just too annoying and time consuming to do it that way.
So, I suggested she use ChatGPT. She has a ChatGPT Plus account, so this seemed like a fair option.