This past month my social media has been plastered with AI-centric content. Among many examples I’ve seen advertisements for AI-generated copy writing, AI generated profile pictures, and, perhaps most bizarre of it all, an AI-generated online girlfriend. One of the surest signs of a technology being adopted is it begins to be micro-marketed. Any potential use-case or need that people will pay for, products will be created for.
I decided to give one of the AI art generators, Lensa, a try myself. The results were both incredibly impressive, and incredibly hilarious.
Some of them were impressive and flattering pictures I would have paid to have an artist create for me:
And some of them were hilarious crapshoots of failed pattern recognition:
All of these AI-powered products aren’t actually Artificial Intelligence though, right? At least not by our standard Sci-Fi definition of it. In all our movies the AI are a self-aware, omnipresent beings with personalities and human qualities. The best AI in far-future stories are often only indistinguishable from humans by their ability to make trillions more calculations a second than we can.
These “AI” products are all simply pattern-recognition and data analysis tools. The AI script-writer software is a program that’s analyzed countless movie scripts and can therefore spit out a script of its own based on common themes and structures. The AI generated profile photos draws from millions of selfies to develop theme and background and plasters the data its drawn from photos of your face into it. The AI-powered girlfriend… well I don’t care to think about how that was programmed.
What our current AI tools lack is the ability to draw new and novels conclusions from the data it intakes. It doesn’t have the capacity for critical thought. They seeking to provide the best answer based on an analysis of millions of answers. And often, at least right now, the answer is wrong (see scary photos above).
It would be more accurate to call these tools “machine learning. And those that create them most likely do. The term ‘AI’ is a marketing gimmick. We are developing machines that have the ability to analyze unquantifiably massive amounts of data and draw conclusions from it. It would likely take a human being an entire thirty year career to read through the amount of movie scripts an AI analyzes to begin writing its own. It would take hours for a talented artist to create one of the above photos of me and an AI spit out fifty of them in ten minutes. This is the fascinating piece of AI technology to me. Not the ability to think like a human. But the ability to think in a way that a human could never have the ability to. AI technology could be akin to the creation of the automobile. The addition of speed and accessibility provided by a new technology could cause entire new industries we never imagined to form.
I mentioned that I recently started a data engineering coding bootcamp. I’ve been introduced to many of the tools that the machine learning technologies we see are built on. It’s fascinating. But it’s also somewhat mundane. Much of the technology doesn’t look like Jarvis in the basement of Tony Stark’s beachside home, it looks like an Excel Spreadsheet. I’m not sure whether this rise in AI-centric content is coincidentally coinciding with my own foray into the technology, or if its just that my exposure is causing me to notice it more. Either way, I’m excited to continue leaning into it.
P.S. This week’s newsletter was written entirely by an AI
P.P.S Just kidding, an AI probably would have done a better job. Maybe one day.