It’s taking me way too long to finish up a particular blog post I’m working on so I’m going to post it in three or four parts. Later on I’ll compile them into a full article.

This has been a hot topic, and for obvious reasons. My take on it comes after testing a whole bunch of different LLMs, art generators, and voice synthesizers.

A quick note before we jump in. As part of the point I want to make, I enlisted a couple of the AIs I regularly use, GPT-4 and Claude to help outline this article. They also have something to add, but more on that later.

Rise of the Titan

It’s everywhere now and it feels like it happened literally overnight: ChatGPT and DALL-E, Claude, Midjourney, Chatsonic, NovelAI, Autogen, this that and the other thing. The scary part is that you can generate fully realized copy or artwork with these in an instant. The more reassuring part is that most AI is as bad at drawing consistently good hands as most humans, and just as likely to spit out your own questions phrased slightly differently than someone who’s only pretending to listen. Hmm, I wonder how that happened.

What we’re currently shorthanding as ‘AI’ is progressing so fast, it’s nearly impossible to stay on top of it all. Something revolutionary probably slipped right under the radar and we’re not going to realize just how important it was until farther down the road. Now, we’ve got a bunch of people panicking about the potential AI has to replace humans altogether. Or … you know, the classic blow us all to smithereens line of reasoning.

As someone who has to do other people’s jobs for them because they’re not meeting management’s expectations and therefore can’t do my own job, and consequently having to watch day after day as my own work piles multiple meters off the ground, I couldn’t care less if half my coworkers suddenly turned into bots running GPT-4V.

Phoenix ranting on Break

Anyway, I want to weigh in on the AI issue for the record and talk a little about it, the good, the bad, and the downright hilarious. When all’s said and done, I believe that the AIs we’re using today are powerful tools that will help those who are willing to embrace them achieve their goals much faster than they would have been able to otherwise. For others, impossible goals could now become possible, and some people who wouldn’t dare to dream of entering the creative world will now have the means to.

This is more of an introduction than anything. I’ll be really diving in from part 2 onward.