In recent years, the doomsday specter of a self aware Artificial Intelligence has permeated science fiction and film. Even Elon Musk one of the founders of OpenAi.com has warned against the dangers of an artificial super intelligence becoming the enemy of mankind.
Experts across the board agree, the science behind Artificial Intelligence is accelerating in an impressive manner, but it is far from becoming self aware and will require decades more of development before it becomes even a glimmer of a threat. Scientists are still working on improving the models for training AI to gain domain expertise.
In the meantime, recent improvements in the algorithms and training of AI within two narrow fields of knowledge are producing impressive results that have real world applications now—as a writing tool, and for creating digital images.
There are many AI assisted writing tools available on the market, both free and paid services. They work by gathering enormous datasets of knowledge and an understanding of natural language and then creating an interface for humans to prompt the AI. The AI processes the prompts and returns an answer. The answers vary in accuracy and how well they match actual human speech, but the results are impressive.
Open AI released a new chatbot, called ChatGPT, and we experimented with it by asking it our own question:
What is open AI good for?
The answer was nearly instantaneous,
“Open AI is a research organization that focuses on developing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to benefit humanity. It is good for researching and developing AI technologies that can be used to solve real-world problems, such as healthcare, transportation, energy, and more. Open AI also works to ensure that AI is developed responsibly.”
The answer is not on Open AI’s website. This was a unique answer it wrote just for our question. Many users point out that ChatGPT is now so articulate that it can create a well written document on nearly any general knowledge topic. It is perfectly suited to summarizes information. It could very easily replace many of the general knowledge articles on websites such as Wikipedia.
School systems used to make school children learn how to research and learn about a topic but stopped after the invention of the internet. Any topic can be researched in depth with a few well written keywords. Artificial intelligence looks as if it will disrupt what and how we teach children because if any topic can be summarized in a few moments, why would a student need to summarize any field of knowledge.
It may also reduce the cost of producing content for corporate blogs and social media. One day, it may even challenge industries where writing is the primary driver such as reporting and technical writing.
Next, we tested an image generating tool that uses a large dataset to define images based on prompts and artistic style. The results were surprising.
All of the following photos were generated completely using Artificial Intelligence and our own prompts. Both the photo and background were generated by the tool. We did not touch up the photos.
We started out with gears because, well, we make gears, and then we branched out to more complex pictures such as animals and landscapes.
We even played around with the style of “artwork” it produced, and the results were impressive.
These are original pictures to which we own the copyright and they took less than an hour to create. Even the most talented designer would require hours or even days to conceptualize and create one of the more complex images such as the bears or the elk.
Long before artificial intelligence gains any semblance of self-awareness, it will perform like most new tools. It will help people improve their creativity and productivity. What do you think will be the next big breakthrough in artificial intelligence? Do you think it is a looming threat or a boon to mankind?
Golden gear #1
Golden Gear #2
Golden Gear #3
Momma and baby bear in a pine forest
Grey wolf in the dark forest
Winter Squirrel