Friday Digest

Author

Bobby Brazen
October 28, 2022

Here's your daily briefing:

  • In this Twitter thread, Daniel Gross shares this "small" thing he built the other night. This is where we are now: "Oh, this tiny thing? It's just something I've built which prompts an AI to literally draw images from audiobooks for you to 'watch' while listening. No big deal." 🤯

  • This Substack piece about how we'll write in 2030 is great and a must-read for anyone who is a writer or hires writers or works with writers (yes, we mean everyone):

Eventually, mastering these tools will be a differentiating skill. The divide, which already exists among students who use GPT-3 to do their homework, will take shape, as talking to AIs to get what you want is not as simple as it seems... In the field of image generation, prompt artists and prompt marketplaces are emerging. Their role? Sell you images produced by AIs without making you write the initial prompt yourself.

In the piece they share the following graph, which we'd never seen before, comparing the relevance of Gopher, Deepmind's language processing model, to GPT-3 and others:

We meet people all the time who are dismissive of generative AI tools and the effects they'll have on their particular field or industry. These types remind us of the Upton Sinclair line:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

But the irony is that going forward, the opposite is more and more true: one's salary is increasingly dependent on their ability to adapt to, learn about, and understand new tools and frameworks for automation as technology evolves. In other words, stay curious and stay informed (and stay subscribed)!

  • It's not just writers, of course, whose work is going to be greatly affected by generative AI tech. This thread by Alexandr Wang shows how marketers can use AI to generate images of their product in a variety of settings:

  • All of this being said, we tend to agree with the sentiment expressed in this tweet by Yi Ma: it's not (yet) about humans vs AI, it's about humans vs other humans adept with AI tools. In the same way that the man wielding a power drill can build a house faster than a man with hammer and nails, the person without awareness of or ability with these tools is just that: a person with one less tool in their belt.

  • In the spirit of staying informed and educating ourselves, we wanted to share this great thread of FREE resources for becoming proficient in AI:

  • This demo by Jeff Powers is pretty wild. We're not even sure we're sure what's happening here, but we think it's fair to say we're seeing someone enter a 3D virtual reality made from a 2D image. 😮

Also think it's safe to say people find this pretty fricking cool:

  • Anyone got a plug at The Information so we can read this piece behind the paywall? Or should we subscribe for $400 a year? 🤔

‘This Time Is Really, Really Different’: The Early Adopter’s Guide to the Ingenious, Uncanny, Slightly Terrifying World of Generative AI

Martin Erlic, who runs an olive oil business in Croatia, used AI text-generating startup Jasper to write his dream sci-fi novel. Architect Nuno Fontarra turns to AI image software Midjourney to dream up whimsical buildings that inspire his real-life designs. And in moments of emotional turmoil, ...

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/this-time-is-really-really-different-the-early-adopters-guide-to-the-ingenious-uncanny-slightly-terrifying-world-of-generative-ai

  • This MIT piece is not behind a paywall and contains a pretty great summary/description of how diffusion models work, amongst other interesting use-cases for generative AI:

3 Questions: How AI image generators could help robots

MIT PhD student Yilun Du describes methods to make generative art systems like DALL-E 2 more creative, while also exploring using stable diffusion models for robots.

https://news.mit.edu/2022/how-ai-image-generators-could-help-robots-yilun-du-1027

That's it for us, for now. See you tomorrow!

"An impressionist painting of cowboy hats lounging at the beach"