I asked ChatGPT to control my life, and it immediately fell apart – Vice
I tell my human boss about my robot boss’ increasingly illogical and borderline abusive demands, and he mercifully gives me permission to end the experiment. Maybe one day the robot boss will be able to understand the emotional minutiae that comes with a dog unexpectedly being covered in dozens of ticks, but today is not that day.
A human wrote this book review. A.I. wrote the book. – The New York Times
Now comes a new novella, “Death of an Author,” a murder mystery published under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine. It’s the work of the novelist and journalist Stephen Marche, who coaxed the story from three programs, ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere, using a variety of prompts. The book’s language, he says, is 95 percent machine-generated, somewhat like the food at a Ruby Tuesday.
Well, somebody was going to do it. In truth, other hustlers out there on Amazon already have. But “Death of an Author” is arguably the first halfway readable A.I. novel, an early glimpse at what is vectoring toward readers. It has been presided over by a literate writer who has pushed the borg in twisty directions. He got it to spit out more than boilerplate, some of the time. If you squint, you can convince yourself you’re reading a real novel. […]
Marche convincingly makes the case, in an afterword, that writers will manipulate A.I. the way that hip-hop producers dig up and arrange samples. Those with the best taste, and the most knowledge, will make the best stuff, some with a genius all its own.
Why you should consider hanging AI art in your home – How-To Geek
Most of the art people put in their homes are mass-produced prints of well-known works, or low-cost decorative art pieces that you’d buy at decor megastores. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it does mean that we decorate our homes with artwork anyone can have. With AI-generated art, what you hang in your home is a totally unique piece. At least, the odds of someone else generating exactly the same piece is so astronomically small it may as well be impossible. […]
Commissioning personalized artwork from human artists is still reserved for relatively wealthy members of society. Artists don’t come cheap, and putting unique, original art in your home is a long and expensive process. Human artists are also in short supply, so finding someone who can create the piece you’re looking for can be a challenge even if you have the budget.
Can we still handle the truth? Journalism, ‘alternative facts’ and the rise of AI – The Guardian
“We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall. This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls,” Steve Bannon told Bloomberg’s Michael Lewis. “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” The news cycle was already moving too fast, already angry and partisan, but flooding the zone went further, aiming to deliberately overwhelm people with conflicting information to the point where they gave up on ever finding the truth, or turned off news altogether, or chose to blindly follow a side, a team. And once people identify with a side, once opinions become integrated into an understanding of personal belonging, they are heavily and instinctively motivated not to assess available information but rather to seek out information that supports their team view, which, on the internet, is always possible to find. […]
The obvious potential [of AI] is for a torrent of unreliable information that would leave Steve Bannon in the shade, vast quantities of articles, books and reviews so laced with mistakes and falsehoods that we completely lose sight of where truth lies and consumers of news and information are even more baffled and overwhelmed and potentially misinformed than they were before. As Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism and Guardian board member, wrote this year: “The real peril lies outside the world of instantaneous deception, which can be easily debunked, and in the area of creating both confusion and exhaustion by ‘flooding the zone’ with material that overwhelms the truth or at least drowns out more balanced perspectives.
Does AI have a subconscious? – WIRED
But as enticing as such conclusions may be, I find them ultimately misguided. The chatbots, I think it’s still safe to say, do not possess intrinsic agency or desires. They are trained to predict and reflect the preferences of the user. They also lack embodied experience in the world, including first-person memories, like the one I have of the bookstore in Chicago, which is part of what we mean when we talk about being conscious or “alive.”
The AI takeover of Google Search starts now – The Verge
This is the new look of Google’s search results page. It’s AI-first, it’s colorful, and it’s nothing like you’re used to. It’s powered by some of Google’s most advanced LLM work to date, including a new general-purpose model called PaLM 2 and the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) that Google uses to understand multiple types of media. In the demos I saw, it’s often extremely impressive. And it changes the way you’ll experience search, especially on mobile, where that AI snapshot often eats up the entire first page of your results. There are some caveats: to get access to these AI snapshots, you’ll have to opt in to a new feature called Search Generative Experience (SGE for short), part of an also-new feature called Search Labs. Not all searches will spark an AI answer — the AI only appears when Google’s algorithms think it’s more useful than standard results, and some sensitive subjects in categories like health and finances are currently set to avoid AI interference altogether.
Catastrophe / Eucatastrophe – Ethan Mollick: One Useful Thing
There are hints buried in the early studies of AI about a way forward. Workers, while worried about AI, tend to like using it because it removes the most tedious and annoying parts of their job, leaving them with the most interesting tasks. So, even as AI removes some previously valuable tasks from a job, the work that is left can be more meaningful and more high value. But this is not inevitable, so managers and leaders must decide whether and how to commit themselves to reorganizing work around AI in ways that help, rather than hurt, their human workers. You need to ask: what is your vision about how AI makes work better, rather than worse?
The DALL·E 2 Prompt Book – Dallery Gallery
Contains guides to: aesthetics, vibes, emotional prompt language, photography, film styles, illustration styles, art history, 3D art, prompt engineering, outpainting, inpainting, editing, variations, creating landscape and portrait images in DALL·E, merging images, and more!
Unlocking creativity with prompt engineering – a16z: YouTube
The growth of AI is changing modern life—including the job market. In just one example, there is a highly creative role emerging alongside AI: the prompt engineer. In this episode we explore the emerging importance of prompting with Guy Parsons, the early learnings of how to do it effectively, and where this field might be going. Will the prompt engineer be more like the highly sought after DevOps engineer, or a proficiency like Excel that you find on every resume? Listen in to hear Guy’s take.
Jerry McNally 