Artificially Intelligent Lawn Care - ChatGPT

I’m doing many things to pass the time this offseason and prepare for some big things next season. One of the things I’ve done is test the capabilities of artificial intelligence. Sometimes pretty random things happen during the offseason.

There’s a program called ChatGPT. To explain briefly it’s a conversational artificial intellegience program. You tell it to give you information about anything, in any format, and it spits out pretty much exactly what you ask for.

Very first attempt I made with it was to ask it to provide a summary of how to take care of a lawn. As soon as you hit enter you watch your request be fulfilled right in front of your face, and your jaw continues to fall closer and closer to the floor. Here is the complete response it gave me:

Impressive, right? This is really accurate and simplified information! Also, kind of scary. What really stood out to me here were the similarities in well-known phrases that are often used to teach these principles, like “deep and infrequent for watering,” and 1 inch of water per week is right on the money. I don’t disagree with anything in this summary. Even with mowing it doesn’t just say mow once a week. It says “aim to mow the lawn at least once a week.” Meaning if you can get a second mow in, which you should, do it!

At least if the world gets overtaken by robots we can have confidence in their ability to maintain a lawn.

Let me know if you’ve had a chance to try this out.