05.10.2023
Who am AI

2022 will go down as the year AI met the public. ChatGPT, MidJourney, NovelAI and a magnificent Cambrian explosion of AI models, bots, image and voice generators, language interpreters, and music composers burst onto the public stage, competing for our attention and promising miracles.

While it’s true these AI project have been brewing for years, it’s this year in which AI has truly grabbed attention, much like the arrival of the internet in the 90’s and perhaps every bit as consequential.

In just the last few months millions of people have experienced for themselves the shocking, delightful, disturbing and sometimes downright weird creations and applications of AI and machine learning.

Models and the AI software to interface with them have spread around the net like an R-factor 20 virus. The image generators can make anything from drawn illustrations to photo realism practically indistinguishable from a genuine photograph. With a decent video card you can set up and run your own AI locally and crank out a new image every few seconds. If you find one you like, throw it back in the hopper and tell it to make variations until you get exactly what you want.

The images generated fill the spectrum of imagination. You could get anything from jumbled garbage to astonishingly beautiful and relevant results, nightmares and abominations you could never have dreamed up on your own to sublime visions of heaven—all are possible and everything in between.

This is no exaggeration. There are limits to the AI’s comprehension, the number of subjects and the level of control, but these limits are probably easily surmounted, We’re in early days here. Already you can take a handful of photos of a famous person and train them against a model, giving the AI the capacity to place that person anywhere and doing anything you want at photographic quality. How long before photographic evidence becomes inadmissible in court?
It seems unimaginable, but so to the silver tongued ChatGPT chatbot that just took center stage. Created by OpenAI, which is owned by Microsoft, the chatbot can discuss any subject under the sun intelligently. It can even argue politics with you, bluster and make up facts out of thin air, like that guy on Twitter you keep forgetting to block.

It can write stories. It can do your homework. It can even write articles like this one.

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