AI is gonna make the future... Weird.
With great potential comes a great amount of weird shit
I’m a skeptic. It’s just how I have always been. When I was a kid, my parents subscribed me to Penny Power, a magazine targeted to children that advocated for smart consumerism, warning about all the bullshit and manipulation that commercials would feed us to try to get us to buy their junk. It saved me a whole lot of allowance money, being skeptical of all the marketing, learning to gather and distill information before getting caught up in the hype.
And I never really dropped that lens of viewing the world - so many things today still look to me just like those 90’s toy and cereal commercials, creating massive amounts of hype only to lead to bitter disappointment. Apple Jacks, man. That shit sucks.
But then there’s this AI stuff, man. Yes, the hype is outrageous. People are already projecting it to take over the world in a few years and either cause the destruction of humanity, or be its savior. And, unlike “web 3” - the extremely meaningless buzzword that was supposed to take over the web - there’s a big difference: It’s actually already delivering.
It kinda scares the shit out of me.
The good!
For a shitposter like me, the AI tools available right now are all kinds of awesome. My broken brain is really bad at being serious and really good at making fun of things, generally thinking “wouldn’t it be funny if…” and making up ridiculous scenarios in my head no matter the situation. But, most of the time (with a few notable exceptions), I’m far too lazy to actually carry out the amusement in my head into any kind of tangible reality that I can share with others.
Well, the bar is lowering, very quickly, in terms of effort level required to bring a dumb joke to life.
With elevenlabs, you can literally take a 10 second sound clip of anyone talking and create an AI voice that sounds remarkably like them, making them say anything you want them to say. It’s absurdly simple.
I used it to make fake clips of my friends saying dumb shit!
With midjourney, you can ask the AI graphics engine to create any image you want, in all sorts of styles, with all sorts of random details to customize it the way you like, and in a few minutes it’ll output the image for you. You can even give it any picture and just tell it to make a realistic render of it.
I used it to bring twitter avatars to life in ridiculous ways!
And of course there’s chatGPT, which you’d have to be living under a rock at this point to not have heard of. Ask it anything and it’ll very confidently tell you… Well, it’ll tell you something. It can be incredibly impressive and incredibly facepalm inducing. But personally, I think the most impressive part is how well it appears to understand what you’re asking. You don’t have to do the annoying stuff you normally have to do with google search, fine tuning your inputs and using “quotes” and +plus and all of that bullshit. Just type your query in, however you want to. The potential applications of this technology are enormous.
I used it to make a Shakespeare style sonnet insulting my friend Brad (while simultaneously wishing him happy birthday)!
And these are the only things I’ve played with so far. There’s SO MANY tools that I have yet to explore, and people on the internet are using them to make all sorts of crazy cool things. Like, you can draw some crappy website on a napkin, run it through one of these AI gizmos, and out pops a functional website. WILD. And they’re all moving SO FAST. Like, this article is likely going to seem quaint and obsolete in a few weeks. The speed of this technology is insane. Which leads me to…
The bad.
While I joke about AI’s potential to end humanity, I’m personally not especially worried about that - well, not yet, anyway. I’m more concerned with the short-term implications - legal issues, copyright issues, jobs.
For instance, right now, you can take a collection of images of anyone, run it through one of these AI thing-a-ma-dos, and output them in videos doing… Well, er, anything you might want them to do. Which can very clearly easily lead down some very dark paths that I don’t particularly want to go into detail here, but you can see the problem. How can anyone protect themselves from this? Do we own our own images?
Not to mention that all of the training data for all this AI comes from, well, us. If the AI uses your drawing to generate its own unique-ish image, and someone takes that image and makes money from it, should you be entitled to some compensation? I don’t think we can count on our lawmakers to be on top of this impending disaster...
Not to mention jobs - while I think it’s pretty darn great that I could potentially get solid, inexpensive legal advice from AI instead of having to pay outrageous amounts to a lawyer, that does kinda suck for people who spent years training and studying to become lawyers and take outrageous amounts of money from us. …Wait, that’s a bad example, no one cares about lawyers. But y’know, mediocre journalists are going to struggle with all of the AI and… Hm, yeah, this also isn’t helping my argument…
But in all seriousness, yeah, a whole lot of jobs are going to be impacted.
Now, is this truly all doom and gloom? Eh. I don’t know. Honestly, I think we’ll figure it all out. Humans are actually quite good at adapting to things, even though we will complain the entire way - we are quite adept at complaining, too!
But, in the interim, it’ll be…
…The weird
What happens when you put incredibly powerful tools that are simple and inexpensive to use, with undefined legal issues, undefined dubious ethics, and undefined direction and potential, into the hands of everyone?
Yeah. Shit gets weird.
There’s potential for all sorts of things to become quite trivial to make compared to before. You have an idea for an app, an animated video, a game? The barrier to entry will be smaller than it’s ever been.
And that means there’s gonna be a whole flood of mediocre garbage getting generated, constantly. We will all be swimming through the AI noise.
Fake videos will very likely become the norm. Y’think misinformation is bad now? Just wait for the inevitable dystopian future, where everyone has to be skeptical of everything. And maybe this is a somewhat good thing - we really should be more skeptical anyway, considering how much misinformation and manipulation there already is out there - but it will get very tedious.
It’s going to be a very weird transition. Similar to the transition we all made when the internet first came out - early adopters will remember how excessively weird everything was in those fledgling days of the internet.
But now it’s all totally normal, right? We adapted just fine. And now we’re all staring at our rectangular screens all day, always connected to everyone and everything, with all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, primarily utilized to yell at strangers across the world, confirm our biases, and act superior. Yep, totally normal. We rule!
My earnest advice? Don’t sleep on AI, get on top of it. Make sure to at the very least play with some of the more popular tools. Familiarize yourself with writing queries that will get you the results that you want from AI (you can call it “prompt engineering” if you wanna sound cringe). Honestly, it’s a lot of fun.
This could just be the tech bro in me and I could just be buying into the hype, of course, but I really do think it’ll become ubiquitous - and if you don’t at least familiarize yourself with the tools and incorporate them into your workflow, you’ll be at a disadvantage.
But eventually, after all the weirdness, it’ll be totally normal! AI generated art, AI generated entertainment, AI generated music, AI generated influencers, AI generated food, AI generated medicine, AI generated significant others, AI generated technology, AI generated AI. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Everything is fine.
Physical labor and craftmanship will be the last to go. Great work as usual, man.
I think AI is more of a win than a loss. I’ve played around with it and enjoy some of it. And like you said we will adapt to it. It’s not going away so we might as well embrace it. I think AI companies should be a limit on what you can do in terms of recreating a video of someone like trump and making him say something racist on call of duty. Or when they have Biden or Obama say dumb stuff. Mainly because I’d say the majority of people above 50yrs old won’t be able to tell if it’s real or fake. The younger generations however are good at spotting these things and should help them if we can.