As the pandemic swept across the world and lockdowns shuttered the economy, my partner and I, like many others, began to discuss the potential for disruption to the food supply chain. Toilet paper and canned goods were disappearing from store shelves. We have always had a two-month supply of food and water (and toilet paper) on hand. With the pandemic, we bulked some of our food supply up to six months (I’m still eating the ramen). As “mostly” vegetarians who only occasionally eat meat, one thing we didn’t have and needed to go out to buy often was fresh produce.
Thus the garden adventure began as a practical act of self-sufficiency to prepare for an uncertain future. Maybe we’d save some cash on groceries to boot.
We soon realized that we were way out of our soil depth. Despite managing to keep a small army of houseplants alive, gardening required a level of knowledge and experience that was formidable. Our first bounty was not bountiful, it was pitiful. What did manage to grow to maturity was unimpressive in its yield. It quickly became clear that we had no idea what we were doing and needed some help if we were going to succeed.
We turned to the internet for advice, scouring online resources and watching countless YouTube and TikTok tutorials. We asked friends with green thumbs for tips, but it still felt like we were missing so much information. We were in need of a detailed, fool-proof plan that we could follow to actually produce some crops.
That’s when we discovered ChatGPT, the AI language model taking the world by storm with its ability to use natural language processing to generate responses to text-based prompts.
This isn’t computer hacker stuff. If you can use Google, you can use ChatGPT.
Within 20 minutes of our first conversation, the AI model had generated a detailed spreadsheet containing week-by-week instructions for care of each of dozens of plants in the garden. After being fed a list of the main vegetables we eat – along with the admission that we’re beginner gardeners at best – ChatGPT helped us pick the crops and specific varieties for our climate zone and soil characteristics that we were the least challenging for beginners to grow. The instructions included fertilizer composition and timing, watering and light requirements, common plant problems and their solutions, and even guidance on which part of our property we should plant on based on our local climate and specific limitations. It gave us valuable advice on clearing land, composting, weed and pest control – all customized with our specific terrain, food waste and local critters.
AI was going to plan and manage our garden.
When we related our experience with ChatGPT to friends and family, most were surprisingly freaked out. It was like we’d teamed up with the killer AI Skynet robots in Terminator. We learned that many still view AI through the lens of dystopian sci-fi, and they have every right to. I still do. It’s going to change everything, and not always in a good way.
But fairly quickly, I invited ChatGPT lovingly into my life. The technology is a friendly, inexhaustible and unpaid expert in anything you want it to be. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.
Is it coming for your job? For many of us, the answer is “Yes”. Some Fortune 500 companies are already freezing hiring for jobs they anticipate AI will be able to do better than humans within a year or less. There are white-collar job-killers training AI to replace humans as we speak. If a widely predicted recession takes hold this year, the bounceback may be historically unprecedented as entire industries are first supplanted and then replaced by AI tools and their operators.
Today, I’m sure a professional gardening expert could do an exponentially better job than AI at planning our garden. I’m also sure that would not be free (nor should it be). Nor are we good enough gardeners yet to go have confidence we’d use expert advice wisely without constant attention. For zero dollars (at least for now), our professional gardening expert is a blink of natural language processing in a supercomputer cluster, open 24/7.
Soon, professional gardening experts will begin to use AI tools like ChatGPT to assist in the busywork. AI will automatically handle invoicing and collections, bill payments, and most financial and administrative tasks. But it will also be used in domain-specific ways in every industry. In gardening, folks are already building AI tools to read smart sensors embedded in soil to automatically adjust watering conditions, temperature and humidity. AI will save professional gardening experts a ton of time, allowing them to focus on why they’re in the business in the first place. If you’re passionate about gardening, you get to garden when you would have been “business-ing”. Or go to the golf course. Up to you what you do with your time. That’s the beauty of AI from the most optimistic view.
But you probably already see the sharp side of the double-edged sword: It won’t be long before AI upends the whole value proposition of having human expertise in a field where humans are outclassed. This is already true in the medical space, where it would be unethical NOT to use AI in certain cases where it is more accurate in making diagnoses than humans.
A lot of people are going to lose their jobs, but a lot of people will use AI to do their jobs and build their businesses better, succeeding at a more rapid pace than was ever possible in human history.
This is why (1) I suggest you start becoming familiar with AI right now by using ChatGPT while it’s still free and (2) It’s good to know how to garden when everyone starts losing their jobs… you’ll need something to do.
So, how did I use ChatGPT to get our garden on track? Two words: “Prompt engineering”.
As I got my feet wet with ChatGPT, I thoroughly enjoyed the novelty of it, but I wasn’t convinced I would actually be using it in my day-to-day life. That all changed once I began learning the art of prompt engineering, which entails strategically crafting questions and demands to generate truly amazing results from AI.
Information on how to engineer the best prompts abounds online, and of course you can always just ask ChatGPT what the best prompts are. In my experience, the most effective prompts are highly customized to the goal you’re trying to achieve. And this is the first, most important tip: Have a clear goal and a clear plan for how you’ll use prompts to steer AI toward helping you reach that goal.
Our goal with the garden was simply to grow a modest amount of vegetables while avoiding making mistakes. Our approach was to give ChatGPT as many relevant details about our gardening situation, and have it spit out planing instructions and maintenance schedules for each crop. Take the time to clearly define the end goal of the prompting, and you shall receive what you’re looking for.
Another key to using ChatGPT is to iterate on your prompts. Because the AI system has memory, you don’t need to necessarily rewrite prompts over and over. You can just say, “Give me the same response, but this time change X, Y, and Z.” You’ll find yourself revising and polishing its output until you have something extraordinarily useful, like a week-by-week table of how to care for each plant in your garden, with columns on each critical detail.
Don’t forget to put AI in its place. Telling ChatGPT which role you want it to play delivers better results than allowing it to spew information as a generalist. I input “you are a gardening expert consulting with me” and “I am a beginner gardener prone to forgetting about plant maintenance”, and the software made sure to fill the role while gently addressing my limitations.
I’m under no illusions that the plan AI gave me for my garden is fool-proof. That’s why I plan on using AI to diagnose any problems I encounter in real-time, and not just ChatGPT AI. Plantin is an AI-driven app we already use to photograph houseplants and diagnose problems. Soon we plan on automating the process of receiving plant care reminders, sending texts to our phones when AI-designated tasks have to be completed. We’ll use it to cut costs on supplies, devise delicious recipes to use our produce in, and make sure our garden is prepared properly for the cold seasons after the harvest is complete.
Turns out this “killer AI” will always be there to get us back on track. Killer indeed.
Can ChatGPT write entire articles? Humbly, AI can’t write as well as I do … yet.
But it certainly helped.
Join the family! 
