It’s Always Sunny at the Generative AI Conference
Tracey Jackson, who has a blog called Marketing amateur, lined up in front of us. I asked him the same question, will AI chatbots take our jobs? “Never say never,” he said. “He still needs guidance, but never say never.” Before he started using AI chatbots, it took him two days to write a blog post. According to him, now it takes two hours. (That is, if the Wi-Fi works well; the love poems we were all waiting in line for suddenly stopped being available due to poor internet connection.)
I returned to the stage just in time to hear a group of executives led by venture capitalist Sameer Dholakia reflect on how this new era of AI will change business. Emad Mostak, Executive Director AI stability, noted that his company’s text-to-image model last August took 5.6 seconds to generate one AI image, and now it generates 40 AI images per second. “These models are actually highly unoptimized,” Mostak said. “We’re just getting started.” After the panel, Anya Singh, who has worked at Google on search products for almost 16 years, willingly showed me the website of NeuroPixel.ai, a company she has invested in. It generates realistic synthetic human clothing models for $1 each. Another company that Singh is involved with, REImagine Home, sucks up photos of your gaudy home space and spits out chic AI-designed decor.
“I’ve been trying to use the internet to decorate my house since September and it felt really broken,” Singh told me. She created visualization boards and designed rooms piece by piece. The estimated cost was thousands of dollars per room, and yet the designs “didn’t fit the gestalt of the entire house, my budget, or requirements.” REImagine home doesn’t solve all of these problems, Singh says, but it eliminates some of the friction. “I like to think it makes poorly performing systems better.”
It’s enough to make any graphic artist or fit model or interior designer shudder. Or that? kevin Roose, The newspaper “New York Times A columnist speaking at the GenAI event said that FOLO, the fear of impending obsolescence, has clouded our collective vision of an AI-filled future. Extremely social, experimental or craft work still requires a human touch. People are safe. Of course Roose had spoken quite confidently about it two days before. New Microsoft chatbot with artificial intelligence told Ruse it wanted to be alive, insisted that it was in love with him, and spat out a list of hypothetical destructive fantasies.
Jordan Harrod, professor of artificial intelligence and Ph.D. at MIT, told a GenAI audience, “At the end of the day, when it comes to how we fit into the equation, the answer is just human connection. The human factor is incredibly important.” To highlight this, Harrod called up an AI-generated graphic of two people holding hands, with the words “Human Connection” to his left. The eerie image showed four wrists, two hands, and at least twelve fingers between them. It was annoying. It was also comforting, if only for a moment.