Keeping Up With AI
Today, OpenAI released a demo/trailer/video or something that demonstrated their new Sora text-to-video capabilities. This, along with all the other AI stuff, is obviously of interest to us internet pirate hustlers and begs a lot of questions:
- Can we automate stuff for fun and profit?
- Do we have to worry about Skynet taking over?
- Should we worry about other peoples’ jobs getting automated?
- Should we worry about our jobs getting automated?
The answer of course to all of these things is yes but it’s also a throw your hands up in the air and get somewhat frustrated that you don’t know what’s going to happen.
I mean, maybe you have a bigger brain that I do and you’re fine. In which case, please continue. Maybe drop a comment with your thoughts and help a small-brained pirate-writer out.
Here Are Some Thoughts…
The problem with AI is that it creates a lot of unanticipated second-order consequences. For instance, a year or so ago there was the excitement and outcry about ChatGPT. At first, writers were concerned, guffawing and everywhere in between about the idea they’d lose their jobs because ChatGPT was great.
While ChatGPT isn’t brilliant enough to knock Charles Dickens off the perch of writing brilliance any time soon, that was never going to be the immediate problem; if you’re a brilliant writer and you are paid to write brilliant words, you’re still fine.
It’s the non-writers who had to worry about ChatGPT’s writing prowess.
Can ChatGPT write technical copy, or medical essays without getting things wrong? Not really.
Can it write simple emails, product descriptions and other banal things that someone who isn’t a writing specialist might do as a single part of their wider duties? It’s a lot better at that.
So, the technology is useful, but with any useful tech, there are the second-order effects. On the plus side, people can do their work more effectively, on the other hand, more efficiency means the job market inevitably corrects itself.
It either contracts or people have to work harder for less money.
Then you had image generation, which went from very bad to very good very quickly. Again, if you’re a super-duper top artist, you don’t have to worry about mangled hands Dall-E and its lack of ability to get lighting right quite yet.
But most art isn’t that. It doesn’t require a master artist; it’s stock photos and advertising logos and all kinds of easy things. This causes massive upheaval in graphic design.
The laws regarding IP and AI are currently changing massively and rapidly, (so rapidly as the law allows – it’s a slow beast.) That doesn’t save Fiverr artists though.
The problem is…
Tech Is Pandora’s Box
With the above developments, there’s very little anyone can do about it. OpenAI themselves have cornered the market and in a way it’s annoying as the technology is controlled by a big, corporate monopoly who decide – somewhat arbitrarily – the morality of outputs that can be produced. On the other hand, it’s an attempt to keep stuff in Pandora’s Box.
Long term, it’ll almost likely fail; the Open Source stuff that’s available now is better than the stuff that was out a year ago by orders of magnitude.
It’s hard to see the implications, and it doesn’t do to dwell on them. But what can you do?
Keeping Up With AI Trends
You can’t put all the things back in Pandora’s Box. You can do a few things:
- Spend limited time reading up on what’s going on and possible implications for it
- See how you can put new technologies into your workflow (with either existing or new projects) and do so
- Come up with a list of ways you can separate yourself from any and all other people in your field – the less replicable the difference, the better
I’m not sure how easy it’ll be to “future proof your career” like some people say. It’s all consequences of consequences, but that three-step solution will get you some of the way there; and honestly might allow you to ride the wave we’re currently riding.
We’ll see how it goes.