Aye yi yi yi yi...A.I.
A headache for some, a boon for others, Artificial Intelligence is here and there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
Everyone’s got AI on the brain.
And on their lips.
If I didn’t have 37 conversations about AI last week, I had 38.
Granted, some were self-imposed. See, I’m working on a presentation on the subject of unlocking creativity. And spoiler alert: AI holds some of the keys.
But no matter what, AI is not on the QT. It’s front and center.
Now, what I thought might be helpful for you is to simply share a bit about my experience with AI.
And before you get too excited, understand I’m no expert.
I’m just a dude messing around with a keyboard and a bunch of platforms and ideas.
First things first, AI isn’t new. The vision of a machine with human characteristics has been around since the ancient Greeks brought us Talos, a giant bronze automaton who guarded Crete.
But things got quite serious in 1956 when scientists at Dartmouth attended the first AI workshop. And started to fiddle around with the notion of machines thinking and being like humans.
(According to Wikipedia, in 1955, John McCarthy, then a young Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College, decided to organize a group to clarify and develop ideas about thinking machines. He picked the name 'Artificial Intelligence' for the new field.)
Fast forward to today and AI has become all the rage due to the advancements in computing power, software sophistication, machine learning and the wide availability of big data.
Oh, and let’s not forget: hype! Media and social media hype is contributing to the accelerated adoption, too. (FYI, it took ChatGPT only 2 months to get to 100 million users. For perspective, it took TikTok 9 months to reach the same amount of users. Uber: 6 years and six months!)
Now, I started my journey with the words. What the heck are we really talking about?
Here are some definitions:
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The idea and field of study that machines can think and act like humans.
Machine Learning
A way of teaching computers to learn from data, instead of just following a set of rules or protocol.
Deep Learning
A type of Machine Learning (see above) that uses artificial neural networks (think lots of electronic brains) that learn complex patterns in data.
Generative AI (GenAI)
A type of artificial intelligence that can create new content like text, images and videos.
Large Language Models (LLMs)
Powerful AI systems that can understand and generate human-like text.
Ok, there you have it from the general to the specific.
I’ve mostly been playing around with LLMs and GenAI.
And this is where you can start to play around and apply it to your work.
Here are some use-cases and platforms that I’m using.
For general info and questions. Also, not half-bad for writing limericks.
Questions. And prompts. Also used this once to take a Teams meeting recording and organize it into coherent notes.
I like this one for questions and for writing routine things. For example, Perplexity is perfect for giving you a rough draft on what you might say in a complaint about your electric bill.
You could also ask Perplexity about the 5 best ways to get out of a ticket if you have to go up against the DMV.
I like this one to organize notes and turn a mass (and a mess) of thinking into a presentation outline.
Also good to ask for things like recipes. “Claude, I have two cans of garbanzo beans and some olive oil, what can I make for dinner with that?” And next thing you know there’s four Mediterranean-inspired recipes.
Now for images…it’s GenAI.
This platform gives you quite a bit of options and styles. I’ll prompt it like this: “…/imagine an iconic representation of Artificial Intelligence done in the artistic style of Rene Magritte.” (That’s the first prompt I used for the image above.) The only drawback to Midjourney is you sign up for it through another platform, Discord. It makes the initial start of the process a bit clumsy.
This platform offers an elegant and easy user experience. And almost as many artistic styles as Midjourney.
A bit newer and working its kinks out.
I recently played around with this A.I. to write a song. I had no reason to write a song but it was fun.
So there you have it. A primer of sorts on AI.
Oh, and in case you were wondering this post was written in RobGPT.
Image: Midjourney.
Eek! The scientists who coined the term “AI” weren’t actually from Dartmouth, they just convened there for a conference/workshop. A quick Google Search lists accredited sources (like universities, public institutions) with the correct info. Much like writers, ChatGPT generates answers and they’re not necessarily the right ones. But unlike writers, machines don’t “think” like we do to question those answers.
You know what really catches the eye here? How you signed it off: RobGPT. Whether or not that was intent, it strikes me you might have just coined a convention that could rescue us all from one of the deeper ethical AI challenges—when it use mutates into deception, pretense, and outright cheating.
If there's such a thing as a "law of tools" like the "law of arms" in political science"— if a tool or a weapon exists, it will be used—but it's outright silly to pretend that people aren't going to climb the adoptive curve like it was flat earth. The productivity gains, not to mention the sheer relief of tedium, make resistance futile.
By the way, as part of the futility as it applies in advertising, would def include clients issuing "thou shalt nots:" in agency contracts.
Meanwhile, while, present day AI really isn't passing the highest levels of the Turing test, it dazzles in thethe instant, but getting discernably thin immediately thereafter, that won't always be so. So I could see a time on the near event horizon when we'll want to let people know that while we were smart enough to capitalize, we also have the integrity to make that fact known . Maybe its teachers requiring students to include, and be graded, on the quality, thinking, and originality of their prompts, as well as on the essay. Maybe we tell the account coordinator that since they're responsible for the final product—lame and formulaic is lame and formulaic—they better do the final draft their own damed selves. Maybe we want to know that we put brain power and energy and heart into this thing, even if the tool helped us get it done faster and with more depth and authority.
RobGPT tells me you used AI in the making. But that the final product is all yours.