Welcome to the beautiful world of Artificial Intelligence. My name is Amelia, and I will be your host and guide as we learn more about this “new” emerging technology that has grabbed the attention of the world since the public release of ChatGPT.
No, but seriously. AI and chatbots have been a continuous area of technology since the mid-20th century. The ___ test to tell if a machine is an AI or human.
This is the KEY CONCEPT about AI that numerous people overlook. Artificial intelligence is an assistant, not a replacement. I feel the number one profession of people freaking out over AI is the artistic community since the release of Stable Diffusion, aka., the backbone of all those photo-generating apps and websites. There are two huge fears of graphic artists.
Fear of Losing Their Job
Firstly, if anyone can generate images with AI, why would anyone hire an artist or photographer?. Sadly two huge points are missed here. The act of engineering “photo-perfect” Images with SD is an art form on its own. Most generated graphics will have twisted, missing, disjointed, mangled, or whatever else problem that most people with an artistic eye will notice. After getting sick of the TOS policies enforced by most AI websites, I switched to operating an open-source chatbot and stable diffusion using my computer with an Nvidia ___ 8GB graphic card. The power of these apps is insane; with the right prompts and models (what SD uses to generate graphics) anyone can generate straight-up pornography. However, I’ve often generated over 100 interactions and multiple changes to the prompt before getting that picture-perfect image. Other times I’ve had to alter the image by hand before running them through the algorithm again, and that doesn’t even include the step of upscaling the image for use in more mainstream projects.
This photo to the right is a perfect example of the point I’m trying to make. While the woman pictured in the center is a figment of a computer’s imagination, the photo has apparent oddities. For example, a dismembered body with a super short crop top and something otherworldly — a giant tee for golf? For one, if you look closer, you will also notice her right hip is missing fabric.
There is one other hidden bonus that I made intentionally that turned out fantastic. Her face was based on about one hundred selfies of my face — besides the model-like body, she is spot on a clone of my likeness.
Fear That AI is Stealing There Copyrighted Works
This is a harder one to answer. While it is true that SD models are generated using terabytes upon terabyte of images from the internet. It’s incredibly hard to determine when and what percentage of a photo was used to generate a particular feature of an image. This is a misconception. People think the AI directly clones parts of their image to fulfill the request. However, what AI is genuinely doing is looking at thousands of examples until learning a link between a word and the appearance of an object. For second point, sure some images look more like an original than others, but particularly in the United States, we have the copyright protection of fair use. This means any artist can take a copyrighted image, and, if enough is changed about it, be cleared of any copyright. This also goes for a styles and appearance; neither of those can be copyrighted. The red and blue artistic images during the Obama campaign are up for anyone to replicate. If I decided to paint an image similar to a Picasso or ___ that is nothing that says I can’t claim that image as my own creation.
Frequent Questions and Answers aka. FAQ
Q. Will artificial inteligence replace my job?
A. No, but also not exactly. This has been a common concern in society since the (or possibly before) the invention of the printing press.. With the printing press, people who spent days replicating a manuscript, such as the bible, delicately by hand, began questioning if they would lose their jobs to a machine. Eventually, society changed. Those same people change profession and evolved to a role of maintaining and typesetting this enormous machines, often making more money.
As it has for decades, the same will likely happen to your job as well. As technology grows, it will make labor intense jobs far easyer and become a no-brainer replacement for professions that are deathly to some people. However, there is where people miss the opportunity. That technology will require more people with education to maintain and operate those machines. This also goes for AI, but with the added benefit that AI is an assistant, not a replacement. So it only stands to enhance the quality of what a person do.