Yesterday I played with Bing Chat, which is Microsoft’s AI engine and I noticed that I could play with generating images. I spent quite a bit of time generating a multitude of images, in part for fun, but also to get a grasp of the limitations of the opportunity presented by software like AI.
Faces If you ask Dall-E via Bing Chat to generate a face then it can. It wanted to generate the face of a woman with curly hair so I did, and the image looks realistic.
I like to experiment with Bard and chatGPT. I like to see what their limits are, but with time and effort I like to get beyond their limits and get them to do what I want, without failing too often.
DJI and other brands have had self-editing options for years now, so the idea that software would edit the footage taken by the brand’s devices is not new. What is new is the desire people have to let AI replace their own creativity, and inspiration, to give the AI’s creative vision rather than their own.
Two days ago I was given access to Google Bard and since then I have been experimenting. The key feature that sets Google Bard apart from ChatGPT is that it can answer questions about what is happening at the moment, rather than before September 2021. By being current you can ask it about yesterday’s news or the upcoming weather for a location, and it will give a useful answer. This is useful for time sensitive questions.
Disinformation and misinformation work for a very simple reason. People who did not study history, and do not follow current affairs do not have the background information to spot what is true from what is untrue. They are unable to use history’s lessons to see the warning signs and act accordingly.
Algorithms and Social Media In Mindf*cuk by Chris Wylie we read about how big data and algorithms were used to identify and exploit people’s gullibility to get them to vote for Brexit in England, and the Republican candidate in the US.
Yesterday chatGPT was down, yet again, so I browsed through the web looking for other Large Language Models to experiment with. In the process I came across personal AI. Personal AI is an app, at the moment, that runs on your laptop, but will eventually come to mobile phones and more.
The premise is simple. You tell the AI things about you, and it then returns answers based on what you told it.
Playing with AI and Learning to Keep It Simple, Silly Yesterday I was playing with AI in the evening and I asked it to help me write a function that would detect whether an array item was a photo or a video. I told the AI, this is a photo array item, and this is a video array item. I want the photo array item to display the img src code and for the video item to be displayed with video src code.
Today I want to discuss something different. I want to discuss using AI as a teacher, rather than as a tool to replace us. For a few days I have been playing with the Instagram json file that I got when I requested my archive. With this json file I thought about things to do, and in so doing asked chatGPT for help, and it provided answers.
Adapting the Questions
They love to say “Don’t fear AI”. They all say “AI is meant to help people with their work”, “AI is meant to be a personal assistant” and more. It’s not AI we fear. It is stakeholders, governing boards and accountants. They are the people we fear. Throw in Inhuman resources for good measure. We “fear” AI because they, all the groups mentioned above, want to use AI as an excuse to fire human beings because computers are theoretically, and only theoretically, cheaper.
If you follow chatGPT and AI courses you will often come across the term “Prompt Engineering”. Prompt Engineering is the art and science of writing instructions so that AI understands what you would like to do. With time and practice you can be as specific as you like. You can fine tune your request until you get precisely what you are looking for. **The Limit of chatGPT. **
“As an AI language model, my responses are generated based on a mixture of licensed data, data created by human trainers, and publicly available data.
I am old enough to remember a teacher writing on a board or piece of plastic for an overhead projector. “Why don’t you just give us photocopies of what you’re writing instead of asking us to copy down what you’re writing. “Because you will remember it better if you write it down.”
At the time this seemed stupid and a waste of time. Years later I think that we could have been taught to take summarised notes rather than literal notes but that isn’t the point.