I’m all over staying on the cutting edge of technology.
I was a little skittish about GPT at first because I thought – like many others – OMG, it’ll take jobs away! We’ll get tripe and crap and trite things because GPT can’t think like humans!
I has similar thoughts, about a zillion years ago, when gas pumps changed from paying a person to do it for you to using a card and doing it yourself. Yep, I’m old enough to remember that. OMG, I wondered, what will happen to all the people who are ‘gas pump jockeys’??? They’ll lose their jobs!!! I was young and passionately idealistic.
And do you know what? It’s quicker to do it yourself! There’s nothing wrong with an improved process. People who did the ‘gas pump jockey’ jobs went on to do something else that was more interesting – and more necessary. I was wrong about the world coming to an end. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Another area in which I was totally wrong was synthesized music. I was super-young at the time, in my 20s (still worried about the gas pump jockeys), so you can’t blame this attitude on old age / old dogs new tricks-incapable, but I remember saying, “OMG, a synthesized flute! Flute players will never get work any more!” I was wrong about that, too. It’s just a different type of music, not exclusionary.
So – fast-forward to now – I was a couple of months late to the GPT party, but luckily, I’m involved in a think tank group that connects peer across industries in a confidential, safe-space way, and one of my gurus in that group showed me the way.
Embrace it. Learn how to harness the power. The trick is to be really good at the prompts. It will never replace the humans, but provide a fab starting point for any endeavor.
Yes.
I got my $20 per month personal OpenAI ChatGPT license and went to town playing with it in the few moments I had free for something like that. Literally, just a few moments: in the car with the Grill-Meister on the way home from an Easter outing in another town, waiting to board the plane for a 3-week work trip in June, during a weekend on that June trip, a couple of times since then.
I SEE THE VALUE. The “blank page syndrome” is GONE if you start with a GPT draft. It just provides ideas that stimulate your creative juices.
During a weekend on that June work trip that lasted 3 weeks, I played with a GPT art tool. There’s a gumbo set of pics that I love love love which needs more time and attention to share properly than I have right now, but one that’s more easily and quickly shared is my cherry sparkler AI interaction.
I thought it would be fun to generate images for this cocktail that has caught fire here at Glover Gardens at recent parties.
My prompt for the pictures:
Here’s what I got from the AI Art tool (I kept regenerating to try to get it to represent what I wanted):
None of these pics really look like my drink, but they’re fun and creative. And they didn’t steal anyone’s job because I was never going to pay someone to create images of my cherry amaretto sparkler! I’m “in the game” by playing with the tools in this way, and more able to imagine real use cases.
And y’all, wait ’til I share my “gumbo by the pool” gpt pics. Wowza, how fun!!!
© 2023, Glover Gardens
Just finishing up a week of teacher training (English) and the feelings about AI specifically the more advanced ChatGPT is interesting. Ranging from Oh awesome to the fall of Western civilization, AI definitely is keeping it spicy. I believe we’re in a paradigm change at this point similar to the one when the internet exploded into public use in the late 90s. I think it’s so much fun and I’m fascinated. Like you, I’m paying right now just so I can play around and experiment more with it. I was just introduced to Bard Google’s AI. On Bard, you can upload documents in jpeg form. Haven’t played with it much – yet. Have fun! 🙂
I think you’re right about the inflection point we’re at. As an English teacher, I can only imagine how it might impact how you do your job – and I think it highlights that your job is truly important. People absolutely still need to know how to write; being able to express thoughts and ideas is a critical thinking skill.
I haven’t used Bard but am very careful with what I upload because of the ownership issues. Do you like it better than Chat GPT?
I haven’t really had a chance to play with Bard, yet. The workshop yesterday had us pull up both ChatGPT and Bard and input the same prompt to both to see how the responses were similar and different. Many teachers and others are very worried about cheating. And I get it, I do. But students (and not all!) have been cheating forever and that’s not about to stop. However, like you said, AI has been around quite awhile and it’s not going away. We need to figure things out. We’re in the infancy of language model AIs, I believe, and as these advance, we’ll learn more as well. My plan is to be transparent with students about AI use, discuss academic integrity, and give them plenty of opportunities to write a variety of different things both on paper and utilizing technology. We’ll adapt! 🙂
I want to be in your class.
Generative AI will take jobs, lot’s of jobs mostly from those people who do repetitive work. It will also open up a lot of academics to cheating to the point that many universities are going back to hand written papers and tests. Many picture agencies have already forbade synthetic media. In the music world streaming services like Spotify have been creating music from whole clothe. You generally see that playlists that have titles like “morning music,” created by musicians that don’t exist. Your own glasses with something red in them are an example of taking work away from photographers which has been happening on a daily basis. Then, there are the ethical and moral considerations of data scraping and massive copyright violations. After all, where do you think the data comes from to build your glass pictures? Not to worry, every picture you’ve ever posted has been added to some AI groups data collection. Of course, none of this matters because according to Bill Gates, AI is the biggest invention of our lifetimes and it’s been developing for over a decade, not just for the past few months. Me? I’ve been experimenting for months. I make mostly illustrations that are of my dreams or nightmares. Oh, and generative AI wrote the world’s worst blog post for Storyteller. Sure, you there are many benefits but think about the trade offs.
I agree with you, and hopefully the people who do repetitive work will get more interesting work. There was a saying going around a few weeks ago that you probably saw: “No, AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to use it might.” A bit harsh but there’s probably some truth to that, and looking in the rearview mirror at the paradigm change of the introduction of the intranet mentioned in the comment above, jobs were changed in a big way with that evolution. I haven’t seen a print newspaper in an airport in a while (more’s the pity, I love to read on a plane).
Tradeoffs – so true! Tools like this can be very powerful if they’re used responsibly. The ownership and privacy questions are important ones. And people can use the tools for nefarious things. We definitely need guidelines and guardrails.
I saw that you were experimenting and am not surprised. These tools aren’t going away and lifelong learners like you will figure out how / if they can be utilized in whatever we’re doing – the same way that you moved into digital photography and continued to produce great art.
What was the bad Storyteller post that GPT created? I’d love to read it. I did a test of Chat GPT for a blog post recently about Trash Can Nachos after I had drafted mine, and used exactly one phrase: “audacious delight”. I do like the AI check that I found a few weeks ago in WordPress on the Publish tab; it almost always suggests that I add a call to action. (I didn’t in this post.)