An Appraisal Of Generative AI

There used to be a chasm between the professionals/specialists and the ordinary in any human endeavor you care to look at. Take painting for example, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo Da Vinci, Claude Monet, and Michelangelo to name but a few knew how to put paint on canvas with meticulous brush strokes. The influences of an artist can be as subjective as art itself, but it is these influences that shape their creations and the manner in which their work materializes. These artists were all masters of their craft and accomplished a great deal in their respective fields. Their works have stood the test of time and continue to inspire and influence artists of today. Some artists are inspired by the profound works left by those that came before them, and others are shaped by their experiences and the environment around them. Some of their masterpieces took over years to accomplish.

It is often argued that the Human Operative System (OS) which is your brain, goes through an upgrade when there is a major advancement in information communication technology. Think of the invention of the Printing Press (1450) followed by Telephony and Radio (1900), Film and Television (1960), The Internet (1995) the Mobile Phone (2010), and now arguably Generative AI (2023). Can you see in that chronology some pattern? It can be argued that these respective technologies informed, influenced, and even distorted the way we perceived the world, and in so doing upgraded our cognitive operating system.

Going back to those famous artists alluded to in the aforementioned, we have revered their extraordinary perceptions and skills for centuries on end but are we now embracing the implementation of Generative AI as confirmation that a fundamental or paradigm shift has occurred since ChatGPT surfaced in November 2022 or there about? The space between your ideas and execution has now been shortened to minutes and seconds. It seems people no longer need years of training to create technically advanced media (text, images, audio, video).

With no discernible artistic talent, anyone can now create something that is actually pretty decent. On second thought, pretty awesome. You only need to look at the output from DAll-E and Midjourney for testimonials. And this is not confined to the domain of imagery only - it cuts right across all disciplines you can think of. In this new era of Generative AI, what do we perceive as extra-ordinary, average, and mundane? We are now moving from the Connected Epoch (the global village) into the Intelligent Age, where it is increasingly becoming easier to mimic and copy others blatantly. With Generative AI, not only can one simply copy prompts and get similar outputs instantly, but one can also ask AI to reverse engineer how things were made - awesome to some frightening to others.

It makes you wonder - does several years of experience matter anymore? Creatives who have gone through the rigorous processes of apprenticeships, certifications, and university qualifications in various professions seem to be at a loss with the proliferation of this nascent technology. The default state seems to be a fight back against the tidal wave of generative AI. To some eminent observers, this resistance seems to be futile. They respond with, "Learn how to surf again with this new technological tidal wave" because this nascent technology cannot replace the creativity, skill, and vision of the human artist. Who is better equipped to write a prompt on legalistic issues - a lawyer or a programmer? You get the drift

Can there be a common ground where the now omnipresent AI serves as a supplement to labour by making menial tasks easier or even non-existent, thereby optimizing the performance of both AI and the human worker? Whichever way you look at it, productivity seems to be the key driver. New research from Stanford University and MIT has found that 14% of employees who used ChatGPT in their workflow saw an increase in productivity - with the least experienced and least skilled workers completing tasks 35% faster. As a productivity tool, when used or operated by someone in their area of expertise it is amazing.

While Generative AI is about the machine mimicking what humans do and doing them faster and better, Creative AI is about humans imagining the magic and using the machine to generate it. To some, this can all be overwhelming and Generative AI can look like "black magic". But what is behind that magic is logic and an awful lot of computational power. As AI is quickly taking away from humans the work of generating and even crafting something, humans are now left with using their imaginations to create the magic. Are we there yet I wonder.