ChatGPT Builds Better PDF Editor: ZDNET Reviewer's Story

A ZDNET reviewer used ChatGPT to build a better PDF editor. The reviewer's wife needed to remove a yellow background from sheet music PDFs to save ink and improve visibility for an app. Initially, Photoshop was too cumbersome, requiring individual adjustments for each image. Direct requests to ChatGPT to remove the yellow background and replace it with white worked, but the AI subtly altered the PDFs. This raised concerns about changes to the musical notes or words. The issue stems from AI being "non-deterministic," meaning the same input can yield different outputs. Traditional algorithmic programming, however, is deterministic. So, the reviewer used ChatGPT to create a deterministic command-line Python script instead. This script successfully removed the yellow background while preserving the music's integrity. This shows that sometimes AI is best used to create the tool itself, rather than performing the task directly.