No. 35: Working with AI instead of competing against it
It's time to stop fearing AI and shift to learning how to use it in your favor
How will you prepare for the future of work? Join us for a peek at the change ahead.
First, some numbers:
$1.81 trillion - Global AI market is expected to grow to $1.81 trillion by 2030
100 million - Almost 100 million expected to be working in the AI space by 2025
4 of 5 - companies say that AI is a top priority in their business strategy
AI-generated artwork wins first place in arts competition, and artists are pissed
Results from a recent art competition give us a peek into the coming conversations and debates that will arise from the growth of AI-generated art.
First the outcry against AI art
“TL;DR — Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize,” artist Genel Jumalon said in a viral tweet about Allen’s win. “Yeah that's pretty fucking shitty.”
“We’re watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes,” a Twitter user going by OmniMorpho said in a reply that gained over 2,000 likes. “If creative jobs aren’t safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?”
And the artist responds…
“I knew this would be controversial,” Allen said in the Midjourney Discord server on Tuesday. “How interesting is it to see how all these people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element! Does this seem hypocritical to you guys?”
According to Allen, his input was instrumental to the shaping of the award winning painting. “I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date, I have created 100s of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas after unshackling with Gigapixel AI,” he wrote in a post before the winners were announced.
To borrow a cliche, this horse has left the gate and the coming reality is to accept a new category of artist who creates with AI instead of fighting it.
Read the full article at Vice.com
Read more coverage via Kevin Roose at NY Times
Tired of not being able to get words to come out right, it's time to try CopyAI. (aff)
AI should augment human intelligence, not replace it
“Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”
- Chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov
Are humans and machine really in competition with each other though? The history of work — particularly since the Industrial Revolution — is the history of people outsourcing their labor to machines. While that began with rote, repetitive physical tasks like weaving, machines have evolved to the point where they can now do what we might think of as complex cognitive work, such as math equations, recognizing language and speech, and writing. Machines thus seem ready to replicate the work of our minds, and not just our bodies. In the 21st century, AI is evolving to be superior to humans in many tasks, which makes that we seem ready to outsource our intelligence to technology. With this latest trend, it seems like there’s nothing that can’t soon be automated, meaning that no job is safe from being offloaded to machines.
We believe, however, that this view of the role AI will play in the workplace is wrong. The question of whether AI will replace human workers assumes that AI and humans have the same qualities and abilities — but, in reality, they don’t. AI-based machines are fast, more accurate, and consistently rational, but they aren’t intuitive, emotional, or culturally sensitive. And, it’s exactly these abilities that humans possess and which make us effective.
Read the full article at Harvard Business Review
A side-by-side comparison of the top 3 AI art generators - Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and StableDiffusion
To best understand the AI-art generating capabilities, here is a Twitter thread comparing the output from the top 3 AI offerings.
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Till next time…
One of the reasons that data is so useful in making better decisions is that basic facts about the world are hidden from us.
-Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut