Reid Main

Always look on the bright side of life, eh? One way of looking at crashing hard at 9pm and waking up at 2:30am is that you got five and a half hours of sleep. But when you're on vacation and are at least four hours away from being able to do anything, it is tough to stay positive. I tossed and turned until 4am before finally managing to fall back asleep until 8:30.

Today was our travel day to Osaka where we planned to spend the next six nights. After packing up and making sure the hotel room was spotless we hit up Mister Donut for a quick bite and some coffee to energize us. We checked out at 11:30am and boarded the 12:17 Tokaido Shinkansen towards Shin-Ōsaka Station. After an uneventfully hour long trip we boarded a local train to Ōsaka Station and checked into our hotel.

Still feeling the effects of jet lag, we decided to relax a bit and plan out our week in Osaka. Generally speaking when we travel we try to have tentpole things we would like to complete each day and then "nice to haves" that we squeeze in if we can. One of those things was a Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition just around the corner from our hotel. We had plenty of time to spare before dinner so we figured why not stretch our legs and see if we could squeeze in a visit that afternoon. This kicked off one of the most eye opening experiences of my life that I'll probably remember until the day I die.

By the time most people are reading this they will be acutely aware of ChatPGT. But in May 2025 I was actively avoiding using it. I had such a revulsion to ChatGPT because, at the time, it was predominantly being used to generate shitty AI "art" by stealing and mimicking the work of real artists. But that is not the point of this article. I'm just trying to convey how naive I was on the possibilities of large language models.

Just before we got on the plane to come to Japan, one of my close friends told me that ChatGPT had worked almost flawlessly as a real-time interpreter with native Japanese speakers. My AI denialist brain initially dismissed this but one of the big things about Japan is how they love to use kiosks in convenience stores for all sorts of mundane tasks, such as purchasing tickets. So as we were walking towards a FamilyMart to see if we could buy tickets for this Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition, I thought back to what this friend had said and jokingly asked ChatGPT. I believe I said something vague like "how do we buy tickets for the Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition". I did not tell ChatGPT where we were but I assume based on my IP address it realized we were in Osaka, figured out there was an exhibition there, and told me to go to the nearest FamilyMart to buy tickets. This was all stuff I already knew but it was interesting to see how quick and correct ChatGPT was. I can imagine how amazing this sort of information would be if you were a first-time visitor to Japan.

We have tried to purchase tickets from these kiosks before with varying degrees of success. You are given the illusion that they want foreigners to use these things by being able to switch to "English" mode. However that does not guarantee everything has been translated to English. We started what we thought was the search process by tapping on a magnifying glass icon and were immediately overwhelmed with what was on screen. I was about to pull out Google Translate and begin the arduous process of taking a photo, rubbing on the part of it I wanted translated, and then attempting to decipher what the fuck the poor translation meant. But on a whim I figured why not take a picture and send it to ChatGPT. To be clear, I did not take the picture and write "Hey ChatGPT can you please help us buy tickets to Jujutsu Kaisen". I literally sent ChatGPT an image of a screen with a digital keyboard on it and no prompt. ChatGPT immediately identified that this was some sort of search entry screen and suggested searching for "Jujutsu Kaisen". But because it realized that this was a keyboard showing katakana characters, it also gave us the katakana spelling as well (ジュジュツカイセン).

At this point my mind was blown as I was genuinely shocked that ChatGPT remembered what I had asked previously and realized that if we're searching for something in a FamilyMart it is probably Jujutsu Kaisen. I continued to take pictures of each screen, giving little to no prompt, as we continued to breeze through the purchasing process. But then we got to the dreaded screen where you needed to provide a name and phone number. 99% of the time these machines will only accept a Japanese phone number and for those of you who do not know it is effectively impossible to get one unless you are a resident of Japan. We tried our Canadian phone number and predictably an error was shown. We took a picture for ChatGPT and it realized that the error message was saying this isn't a valid Japanese phone number. Unprompted, it suggested a placeholder phone number that should allow us to skip this step and it actually worked!

We received our receipt and took to the cashier to pay where we were handed tickets for the Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that we would not have completed this without ChatGPT. Google and Apple Translate are complete shit in comparison. What just happened was basically what a decade ago Apple had promised Siri would be, and to this day I still cannot get Siri to correctly play a song from my Apple Music library.

If you are reading this and are thinking that this Reid guy is an idiot because that is one of the most basic things LLMs can do, you're not wrong. But in May 2025 that information had not reached me. My exposure to them was mostly self-identified "prompt engineers" on social media who thought they were creating generational masterpieces by typing "cat on bicycle studio ghibli" into a website. But after this one interaction with ChatGPT I am an AI convert. I am still not one of those idiots who thinks that artificial general intelligence is right around the corner and Tesla robots will soon be doing all of our household chores. But their pattern matching and prediction abilities are so far ahead of what humans can do that it feels like this similar to how digital calculators or CAD tools revolutionized industries. Even for programmers like myself, these tools are going to drastically change how we build things and I am convinced that if I want to be relevant in 10 years I need to find a job works with LLMs. Either that or just give up and become an electrician.

After this epiphanous moment, our stomachs had begun to rumble so we found a restaurant serving kamo nanban, a soba dish with duck meat and welsh onions that is apparently popular in Osaka. We then wandered around the city a bit taking in the sights before picking up some snacks at the konbini and heading back to our hotel. Following a quick shower I was back in bed by 9pm hoping that my third round with jet lag would go a bit better.