As some of you know, I have gotten elbow deep into coding and I poke around with a minimal amount of AI / Machine Learning stuff now. It has become part of my job.
And it can do amazing things. for example, here is the ChatGPT summary of this post:
Artificial Intelligence can be great. It can create imagery that is realistic, it can copy-edit text, and it can help organize ideas for a presentation. It is even a bit circular, too, as it helps me write the code I use to develop it.
I am here to tell you that this stuff is as low-quality as it is going to be moving forward. It is only going to get better, smarter, and more realistic.
Here is the same prompt as the image on the left above, just asking it to make it look like ti was “shot on 35mm film”
Pretty realistic.
This level of development and skill is both good and bad.
For the day-to-day human experience, you really need to train yourself and your friends, and your kids, and your family to be skeptical of anything and everything they see on a screen.
E V E R Y T H I N G
Open AI is coming out with a video creator soon (posted above) and I’ve seen some previews that make the image here look cartoonish by comparison.
People used to warn that AI was going to be like walking through a door into a room we are not prepared to enter and can never leave. And I listened, but didn’t think it would be that big of a deal. Sure, it would be transformative, but not so quickly and not so drastically.
But now I think it will be.
Because we have to re-train ourselves to think more critically and be skeptical of everything our eyes see. And “seeing is believing” for many people.
The number of “deep fake” style developments will be avalanching through society because the developers of such things realize critical thinking isn’t something most folks prioritize during most interactions with new information. Often, many people absorb new information and then, perhaps at a later point, think critically about it. But sometimes, they just take it for what it is.
You may chuckle at the above headlines, but I worry about these types of things happening more and more for other political races, votes, etc. It can have a very damaging impact on democracy.
On top of that, the level of automation of tasks is going to grow exponentially during the next decade. You will be interacting with a machine more and more — at times without realizing it.
It will move a lot faster than you think. Because in about 18-to-24 months we have went from ChatGPT being able to answer simple questions with meaningful responses… to the same company producing images (like this) and video that are realistic enough to fool a human.
And that is just one example of one company across a landscape of an enterprise of varying different businesses with different motivations and goals.
All of this means that understanding how to prompt a machine to give you the answer you are looking for will become a valuable skill. These advancements will be very helpful in day-to-day life when used with good intentions.
But, as we know, not all users of a technology use the technology for good intentions.
That is why I would encourage everyone to take time here and there to make sure you are keeping up with the advancements of AI.
