Every road trip has those first few miles where you’re just getting a feel for the road. With Trailbyte, those miles didn’t always lead where I expected. I first began using ChatGPT a little over a year ago, in mid-April 2025, and what a ride it has been.
The backroads of Alternate Intelligence have come with their own learning curves, detours, and occasional loopbacks. In thinking about those twists, I found myself recalling the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage — a movie I hadn’t thought about in decades. Strange how old ideas surface when new ones bend the road.
The metaphor struck me immediately: exploring AI has often felt less like peering under the hood of a machine and more like opening the hood and climbing in. Not observing from outside, but traversing something from within. And, in many ways, that is exactly what I have been doing.
As I entered the AI realm, I found myself on the Alternate Intelligence version of a virtual highway — AI 67, speed limit 19ish. Seemed like every time I tried to do something straightforward and simple (because that is how AI is supposed to make you feel), I ran into curves, corrections, and rabbit holes. Nothing is ever truly straightforward on AI 67.
And thank goodness the speed limit was 19ish, because at a faster pace I might have slid off the road entirely. That thought oddly brings to mind “A Sound of Thunder,” Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story in which time-traveling hunters must stay rigidly on a floating path lest a misstep alter the future. In AI, a wrong turn can feel a little like that. I certainly wouldn’t want to accidentally kill a virtual butterfly along the way.
One of the first things I discovered on AI 67 was that imagination often arrives before accuracy. AI could produce stunning things in seconds… but if you looked closely, there was often something just a little sideways hiding in the details. Sometimes hilariously so.
My “Action Figure Toy” adventure was one of those early roadside stops. Like many people at the time, I decided to see what AI could do with a photo and a simple idea. In this case, it transformed me into a brightly packaged “Road Warriors” collectible complete with Miles, cameras, birds, Route 66 vibes, and a pocketful of freedom. It was creative. It was weird. It was unexpectedly delightful.
It was also gloriously flawed.
Somewhere along the AI assembly line, “phone” became “PHHONA.” “Includes” became “MCLUDES.” “Adventure” turned into “Advanture.” And there appeared to be a warning label about attracting something… though to this day I am still not entirely sure what I was supposedly attracting.
Welcome to the learning curves.
That became one of the recurring themes of my first year traveling the backroads of Alternate Intelligence. The road was rarely straight. Every prompt became its own little roadside attraction. Sometimes I got exactly what I hoped for. Other times AI took me on a complete detour into absurdity, rabbit holes, and occasional digital train wrecks.
And yet, strangely enough, those imperfections often became part of the magic.
The more time I spent on AI 67, the more I realized this was not really about perfection. It was about exploration, discovery, experimentation, and curiosity. It reminded me of old-fashioned road trips where the unexpected moments become the stories you remember most years later. You rarely remember the smooth stretches of highway. You remember the weird diner. The broken sign. The accidental wrong turn that led somewhere unforgettable.
AI has worked much the same way. Sometimes the frustrations were real. There were moments where I wanted to throw my virtual hands in the air and abandon the whole trip. Images failed. Text glitched. Conversations looped in circles. Memory vanished into the digital wilderness. At times it felt less like driving a modern interstate and more like navigating a foggy mountain road with hand-painted warning signs that read “Learning Curves Ahead.”
But every curve taught me something.
Over time, the road became less about simply “using AI” and more about collaborating with it. I stopped treating it like a machine that spits out perfect answers and started treating it more like a strange traveling companion riding shotgun on a very unusual road trip. Sometimes insightful. Sometimes hilariously wrong. Sometimes unexpectedly profound.
Together we have created posters, fake magazine covers, imaginary highways, road signs, fantasy scenes, historical adventures, strange slogans, and enough surreal imagery to fill an entire roadside museum somewhere off Exit 19ish. It practically became a National Hysteric Trail and continues to be so to this day.
But I couldn’t always Enjoy the Ride. There were times where I just said screw it. Got too frustrated with the Generative AI stuff and the AI image generator reinterpreting my images.
A prime example was a book project I began — and am still working on — that sends Miles and me traveling through world history. One of my favorite concepts placed us in feudal Japan during the Shogun era. Ancient castles. Samurai troops. Kyoto backstreets. Miles loyally at my side. The name on the banner beside me even referenced “Kurabetsu,” the Japanese name I used while living in Japan years ago. That image worked beautifully.
But then came the curves. I decided to create another scene showing Miles and me walking through a crowded samurai-era market in Kyoto. The atmosphere was wonderful… except for one problem: The AI-generated “me” did not really look like me. It looked more like AI’s interpretation of me. A sort of alternate-universe Sumoflam wandering around Kyoto carrying an octopus.
At first, I assumed I could simply “fix” the face the way one might tweak a photo in Photoshop. So I resent my original photograph and tried again. The next version was even worse… nothing like me. That was one of the major learning curves I encountered on AI 67.
I learned through a couple of hours of frustration that Generative AI does not really “edit” images the way many people imagine. In many cases it recreates the entire scene from scratch every single time. Every retry becomes its own new road. Sometimes better. Sometimes worse. Sometimes unexpectedly bizarre.
And yes… sometimes frustrating enough to make me veer directly into Screw-It Curve.
Somewhere along the way, AI stopped being just technology and became a creative mirror of sorts. It reflected not only ideas, but themes I had apparently been carrying around for years: wanderlust, curiosity, backroads, birds, signs, humor, storytelling, serendipity, and the eternal desire to “Choose Happy” even when the road gets rough. And perhaps that is the biggest surprise of all.
I began this trip thinking I was exploring Artificial Intelligence. Instead, I often found myself exploring Alternate Intelligence… and maybe a little more of myself along the way.
Did you enjoy what you saw here? My books cover so much more.
LESS BEATEN PATHS OF AMERICA TRAVEL SERIES
You can get my books online! The series now has five books and I am working on books six and seven. Book Six will hopefully be all about murals from all over the country!! Watch for them later in 2026.