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Andrea Szilagyi's avatar

Social media is full of posts of how to use and prompt AI - but mostly for very generic content. There is a whole pandemic of AI generated comments too, which always makes me smile.

As a founder of an AI-assisted data analysis tool, for us it's important to use AI for it's strength and not to hand over the analysis itself. We output insights based on statistical rules, which then AI can speculate on and give context. The word speculate here is very important. AI is a tool to help in work, but you need to always fact check whatever it outputs. It loves to hallucinate. If you are a student, especially make sure not to sound like everyone else using AI to apply for a job.

Great read as always Monica :)

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Whiz Pill's avatar

will bloatware turn the web into a graveyard generated parroting? let's follow the rabbit and find out 🐇⤵️⭕️

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Heidi MC's avatar

There are many concerns with AI… Not a big fan of Altman. Nor the quasi non-profit OpenAI either… I get the disingenuous feels.. but the thing that really gets me is the amount of water consumption that the GPU chips require for Chat GPT. 5 searches can use up about 16oz of water. Is it really worth it to have a bot do your googling for you?

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Andrea Szilagyi's avatar

There is a whole Altman cult, which is quite shocking. Yes, I heard about the water consumption and it's crazy!

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Monica Nastase's avatar

Good point, Heidi, thank you. The environmental aspect of it all makes it even worse.

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Monica Nastase's avatar

It's important to keep the AI hallucinations in chrck. AI comments on social media is a special kind of hell

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Alexandru Constantin's avatar

Exactly. We are in a strange era of technological stupidity. In the past, when new tech came out it was exciting and I could see how my life would be, even if marginally, improved. I remember the early days of the Smartphone. I got a Blackberry Curve, having access to live mapping and being able to coordinate bar hopping with friends in real time was great. Now all those sites I used to use, like Facebook, are garbage, filled with AI spam, and idiotic algorithms that make them useless as a tool.

I look at that new Apple vision thing and the only thought I have is how stupid and useless the whole thing is. How will my life be better if I sat on the couch with a idiotic eyepiece next to my wife in her idiotic eyepiece. Are the morons who come up with this garbage even human?

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Whiz Pill's avatar

a couple monkeys discover cobalt and silicon "yooooo you have no idea how much innovation we gonna do with those, it'll make the dinosaur mass extinction look like a skit cuz we gonna change the landscape like never before"

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Monica Nastase's avatar

They must be because, you know... many humans are, in fact, morons.

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Elisabeth Parry's avatar

Great article, thank you.

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Gunnar's avatar

Nice one, Monica. Puts together several important insights - the trivialization is a point that isn't addressed enough in most of the writing about this issue.

(Also, A plus for the title. ;))

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Whiz Pill's avatar

wonder if the team behind Black Mirror feel proud of themselves for predicting the future... or giving these founders the exact blueprint they needed to create these new "tools"

Roko's basilisk is spinning in its grave as we speak

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Monica Nastase's avatar

Thanks, Gunnar. I had fun with the title. 😊

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Alex May's avatar

Excellent article, Monica.. In the UK we are now getting AI generated robo calls, suggesting the potential of AI to put hundreds of phone scammers from India out of work.

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Obsidian Blackbird.'s avatar

Wow... this in new and very smart. I liked this one :)

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Monica Nastase's avatar

Thank you!

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Rosa Montero's avatar

Brillant! I liked it very much. Thank you, Moni

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Sheila's avatar

Great topic!

I have had robotic surgery, when I was wheeled into the operating theatre I was in awe of the big machine above me that’d be going inside of me. SUPER cool stuff.

I saw the other day a video about AI and education, the woman was speaking about how running a tool to check for AI is going against the current of change. Suggesting that students should use the tools to write something then use their time analysing it. I love that idea!

As the flow of technology moves forward, I do use some of it, but this year I’ve been moving analog again with my first physical diary in years and a record player. I realised I’d not listened to an album straight through since my CD player was my only source of music. 🎶

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Monica Nastase's avatar

Sure, it all depends what you use it for. I use AI too, and we all do, but toys should be sold in the proper category. 😉

Enjoy your analog moment!

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Sheila's avatar

Hahaa yes I completely agree, sorry I missed the whole point. I don’t think a robot can replace human creativity. My Google speaker ‘made up’ a poem yesterday and it was terrible, it lacked soul. Something robots will never have is a soul ❤️

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Paul Moxness's avatar

Thanks for looking past the hype, Monica. Great article!

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Monica Nastase's avatar

Thanks, Paul!

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Elaine Foreman's avatar

Excellent, Monica. I love the way you think and how you express it.

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Monica Nastase's avatar

Thanks, Elaine! What an honor.

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Brina Patel's avatar

"ChatGPT spits out factually incorrect answers regularly, with the certainty of an ignorant human." OMG -- this!!

At my last job, I was required to use ChatGPT to write long-form articles and blogs. It was appalling how much incorrect scientific info Chat gave, and with unwavering confidence. I have a very resentful relationship with ChatGPT because of how many people have hopped on the bandwagon and succumbed to "shiny object syndrome."

There's so much (really bad) Chat-written content out there now. I've seen a lot on Medium and it's frustrating to see people engaging with it and taking it at face value. And of course there are all the other issues you mentioned about copyrighted work, threats to creativity and concentration, etc.

I'm worried to see the impact this will have in a few years, but I'm trying to stay optimistic and hope that there will be an even bigger appreciation for human-created work. At the end of the day, ChatGPT doesn't have soul or the ability to speak to very real human emotions and experiences. And we need that rawness more than ever.

This was a very thought-provoking and wonderfully-written post! Thanks for sharing, Monica.

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Monica Nastase's avatar

It's definitely a shiny object syndrome all around, and imagine how all websites on the internet will look in a year from now, with a majority of their content rephrased from other websites' AI content. We won't know anymore what's true and what's not. I think the Internet will break because of this. And then they will call us, humans, to fix it with our human-written and fact checked words.

Also, one of the absolute worst practices is generating AI content as replies to posts on social media (LinkedIn, etc.). So, faking your contribution to a conversation with another human (?) by generating an AI comment... I just can't.

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Brina Patel's avatar

OMG yes! It's very concerning what it will do to human knowledge. And I've been seeing AI-generated comments a lot on Medium, as well, and it irks me to no end.

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baibin's avatar

I've been open to playing around with ai in various forms, partly because as a working creative I want to know what I'm up against. In my experience ChatGPT output alway sounds a little bit the same, even with carefully crafted prompts everything has a very specific tone that's hard to put your finger on. It is far from creative. Creativity comes from remixing ideas and adding a person touch of innovation to create something new. Ai is just the idea remixing on a massive scale and you can see and hear that in it's output. I think people like Adobe have the right idea about embedding AI into a creative workflow for things like background removal, image editing etc...but I think we're a long way off it replacing creative jobs... However there was a very interesting podcast episode that says otherwise, would recommend a listen to this!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5FSMv8ph4kuNEoygmVAvl0?si=9EH7b-CqSCSDBsvhrfB2Bg

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Monica Nastase's avatar

I agree that the AI content sounds very similar, you could argue it has its own style book haha. Of course AI has its benefits, like you say, for retouching, or basic research, but not relying 100% on it, like some businesses imagine it could happen, just to cut costs.

I'll listen to the podcast, thanks for sharing it!

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Pranath Fernando's avatar

Hi good to read your post!

So a few thoughts...

I guess you could see AI as a tool, a technology so in that way then it wouldn't surprise me we get these bad use cases as well as good ones? for me its no surprise I guess!

And, is it so surprising we have AI trivialisation when our culture itself is so trivial?

I wonder if we are blaming AI for things that are to do with our own human flaws perhaps?

Is AI much like a mirror to the human soul, reflecting back some things that delight us and some things that repulse us? but also, believing these qualities belong to the mirror rather than ourselves?

I do sympathise against this obsession with optimisation. But are we not part of these cultures and societies that propagate these values? I'm wondering is it easier to blame others for this, rather than look at how all of us are contributing to keeping this system going?

On these AI tools being a solution to problems we don't have - a few points. Firstly, technology tends to do this, produce things that have no obvious use, that later are used. For example the internet originally started as a defence project, then a project to link academic institutions. These organisations didn't need the internet, someone thought lets try!

What the internet ended up becoming was more than was imagined. I'm surprised, because what you wrote seems to be against the idea of experimentation, trying things out not because they are needed, but just to see what happens. That seems a very human quality? so i'm surprised you seem so against that basic human desire to try new things just for the sake of, which is how many inventions were created? Indeed how many creative arts work?

On your moral question, creative ownership etc,, I guess I see it very differently to you!

This explains my position better.

https://thefuturai.substack.com/p/originality-on-trial-ais-challenge-to-creative-ownership-d7cdb58e7909

On your final point about AI and post-truth, again I see it very differently. I don't see it that way, for me there is no post-truth state. Humans have lied, distorted the truth, made mistakes for thousands of years, this is not new! That AI is now doing this a little (not as much as you suggest) is so ironic obviously, but also further suggests AI is a mirror to us.

We can blame AI, but are we just using it as a scapegoat for things we don't like about ourselves as humans? is it a mirror to us? for surely, its us as humanity that created it?

A flower pot can be used to harm someone, if we throw a flower pot at someone, use it badly. Does it make sense to blame the flower pot, or focus more on the person who used it badly?

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Wyrd Smythe's avatar

Why would I care about "art" that only took a prompt to make? If there is any magic in art, it comes from the sweat and blood of the artist.

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Monica Nastase's avatar

Absolutely!

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Cristina Carmona Aliaga's avatar

Very relevant and timely indeed, Monica. The UK government has been recently consulting on AI and copyright as the Creative sectors here contribute massively to the economy but also they are being transformed by AI. I work in this space so I'm always in two minds because I've seen really cool things done by people who want AI to be a tool to enhance human creativity without replacing it but I also can see that they're unfortunately not the ones driving the AI agenda. With the US government adopting a pro-innovation approach, things are about to get very messy as US tech companies will be operating under an unregulated environment that will put no limits to what they can do. And this is important because they are trying to persuade EU companies to follow their path. Sam Altman, who will be at the AI Action Summit next week in Paris, has made sure to repeat that too much regulation hinders innovation. The EU already has passed the EU AI Act and seems to be more sensible in how AI should be developed in order to protect users. So yes, your reflections a year ago definitely ring very much true today.

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Monica Nastase's avatar

Thanks, Cristina! It's true, lots of developments happened during the past year, including this new catchy naming as 'pro-innovation approach'. And who can argue with that approach?! It reminds me of pro-life...

There are definitely great things being done with AI, but as you say, the flag bearers have dubious morals which seems to put a stain on the entire innovation opportunity. We shall see how this unfolds...

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