Where I won’t use AI
As you’ve probably already spotted, the image for this article is, in fact, an AI generated image. I will go into detail about the image itself later in this post, but I want to assure you that I am not trying to pull the wool over your eyes!
What I mean when I say that I won’t use artificial intelligence is that I will not use it for any of the written content that you will find here in this blog. I want to keep all the written pieces here 100% from the inside of my own head so that it can continue to truly reflect my journey and my thoughts along the way. This is because I see language as a gift for conveying, transferring and even storing ideas, and without staying true to it being only my own actual production here, I will not be able to claim ownership over what is here.
Contrary to that, I don’t mind the images at all. In fact they’re quite fun to play around with and even reveal some interesting insights into our own psyche once you start to delve into the way we use the tools available.
Why I won’t use AI
The reason behind me not wanting to use AI for this blog, besides the before mentioned view of “language is a gift”, is that I can already see the landscape changing, and with that, the value of the written word may well decline in my opinion.
We saw it with video content. The moniker of “YouTuber”, over the last 5-10 years became synonymous with being rich and famous. There was good reason for this as a great number of content creators made a decent living off of what they could earn through their channel when they had moderate numbers in the audience, and some have even had huge success in both status and earnings when their numbers went into the millions. There was enormous value to be reaped by those with the means to create content that garnered the attention that was efficiently converted in advert revenue, and rightly so! Back then it was not easy to create high-quality video content. Back then.
Now, however, every man, woman and child (and even their dogs) have got a recording studio with built in editing suite in their pocket. Technology has come such a long way, so fast that almost anyone has the power to create a fortune at their fingertips. But that creates the age old problem that is the basis of economic studies, supply has over-run and the demand, even though it probably has also risen, just hasn’t done so to the same degree. This is evident in the way stars are born, burn bright for their 15 minutes, and then die out at an ever increasing rate because they’re so easily replaced. The churn rate makes your head spin.
I fear that the written word is headed in the same direction because there is bound to be a huge influx of AI generated written content that is SEO super-charged just over the horizon. Part of the reason I think this is because I am working on tools at the moment to make it possible for people to ramp up their productivity 50 fold. It is possible, thanks to tools like the ones created by OpenAI, for a single person to generate the work of 50 in less than a day. Instead of writing entire articles, like this one, all that is required is a prompt alluding to such a piece and a machine that was trained on all the available written content out there in the world wide web, will understand that prompt and create something to fit. And it will be better than this, human-written article because it can calculate SEO targeted keywords and use them strategically to ensure that the article appears higher up in the search results than other articles on the same topic.
That sellable value is what has brought about the beginning of this gold rush.
Who will use AI
Businesses mostly. The aim of business in a capitalist society is to make profit. Profit comes from making sales and a business can only sell to those that know and want their product. The product is placed before those that need it by advertising. Advertising used to require seasoned professionals that would be worth their weight in gold, if not more, because they knew how to draw the attention of the masses that would spend on your businesses products. An article generated by artificial intelligence, that has been asked to focus on the SEO will now do just that at a cost so low I am surprised advertising agencies haven’t tried taking AI developers to court. The ultra-powerful articles can be generated for pennies.
The businesses cannot be blamed for this. I would dare to say they’d be foolish not to jump on this right away! But how long will it take for the value of these SEO focused articles to drop dramatically?
What does it change?
Ranking on Google is a comparative game. Each result is compared to it’s peers and listed accordingly. For the end user, who only wants good information, this is fantastic because it certifies that they’ll get the best information available. But if the first page of Google only shows 20 results and all at the same time 100 brand new articles about the same topic appear that all have tip-top SEO… what happens then? Does the user of the search engine still end up with the best information?
Quality
The available information on the internet before this new wave of AI came automatically with an Open-Source-esque peer review, because if some source was publishing bad information, someone else, be it competitor or Karen, would put them on blast and cause public embarrassment. It kept things with an above 95% certainty and I think we may have taken those times for granted.
Pages like Wikipedia are perfect examples of how truth would just be he default as even when someone would put some false information, even as a joke, it would soon be corrected because we humans have an innate desire to be right all the time.
Quantity
More information, coupled with the risk of a decline in quality, is also not the best thing. The language models that will be used to generate this content will eventually be trained on the content created by the generation of machine learning before it and should some mis-truths get in there, who is to say where the compounding of errors will stop?
I would definitely rather have one, very good and very accurate piece of information than five hundred vague or even slightly incorrect ones.
What I have tried so far
To this present date, I am yet to try out the text generating facilities available, but as I mentioned, I will be working with it heavily starting tomorrow and I still feel a little uneasy about contributing to this. But, it is the way things are going, so I had better not let myself get left behind.
I have had a little play around with the image generating Midjourney, just today because I wanted to be annoying and use an AI image for a written piece about why I won’t use AI for my writing. Yes, I’m that kind of person. I will tell you what though, I was amazed by the results and had a lot of fun obtaining them!
ChatGPT
I feel like I am the only person on all of twitter that hasn’t actually tried ChatGPT, but I will be changing that from tomorrow when I start working with it. I can however, direct you to click here for a very interesting video that my colleague made of interacting with it.
He also made a few articles with it’s help. Bouncing ideas off of it and turning the responses into a single article that you can find here which is interesting, but I found too many small discrepancies in the responses to give ChatGPT my full confidence. Still cool, but I just don’t rate it too highly.
There is a much stronger model called DaVinci, but I haven’t used that yet either.
Midjourney
So this thing can be fed prompts over Discord and if you take a few minutes to read over the documentation, it can do rather a lot and take an astounding amount of input. I wanted an image for this article of myself “standing out from the crowd” as that’s what I thought my stance on the subject kind of is because I have only seen social media giving these tools all the hype and praise you could imagine.
I had a little browse through what other people had created for free in the newbie sections of the discord server, I also had a little look at one twitter account that I follow that shows AI images and sometimes hints at the prompts used. Click here to check them out. So after a little thought about what I wanted to represent with an image I thought to take my image from this site as I use it also on my own twitter account and add a little descriptive text prompt to spice it up:
/imagine https://<url-to-image> standing alone and ignored in the middle of a darkened and bustling crowd, ultra realistic, golden hour, Leica 50mm, f1. 4, 8k
And the result was the header image for this article. I though it was way cooler than I imagined it would come out. So of course, I had to do another one!
This time I went through a lot of prompts by others and found a photo of myself where I was dressed a little better. This also revealed a self-projection that perhaps I need to address, but nevertheless produced something that I must share and will probably use elsewhere:
/imagine https://<url-to-image> as a male god stood surrounded by morbid sullen people, highly detailed, volumetrically lit, style of Alphonse Mucha and Beksiński, 8k, dark, intricate, 24mm lens, with intergalactic backdrop
Which resulted in:
Even if the cheeky sod aged me by 20 years (or 40 if you compare it to the first one!), I had to pause for a moment and appreciate that this is amazing. I told a machine a bunch of cool sounding stuff and it gave me back an even cooler looking image. I am a big fan of what kind of images people will be able to produce with this. I will definitely honing my prompting skills and playing with this again;
- only for images with personal stuff
- but also for written content, cos it’s already become part of my job
What was it old Abe Lincoln said?
The best way to predict the future, is to create it
So we’d better all get on out there and get creating.