Let’s talk about AI. I’ve always had a great interest in AI, especially with the rapid advancement of GPT LLM models in the recent year. As a developer and builder, it has allowed me to do so much more. Refining startup ideas, crafting marketing pitches, generating social media content, demystify challenging concepts, answer programming questions. These are just a small glimpse in the immense way that AI has influenced my life.
So how should we use AI? Is there even a ‘right’ way to use AI? Well yes and no. I do believe in the tremendous potential of this technology and its ability to perform an task. But, here’s the big but, at the current stage of AI, there are ways to maximise its utility. LLMs are really good at organising and structuring textual information. Hey, here’s a news article. Summarize it and write a blog highlighting the main takeaways and how it is relevant to the context of [insert country]. Here’s a list of task I have to get done by the week, help me plan a productive timetable. In such use cases, AI presents itself as a tremendously powerful tool, specifically in its ability to almost instantaneously organize content in a fresh and interesting way that would take a human (flesh and bones) way longer.
However, I do feel that AI is lacking in the creative department. Help me think of a name for my startup idea. Hey, write a original personal statement based on my achievements here. AI is barely decent in developing really creative ideas, and performing tasks that involves the human experience and touch. Not to say the results are garbage, but they’ll usualy require a few more rounds of human refinement to reach production quality. If there’s one thing to takeaway from my experience working with AI, is that it is the literal biggest black box, accuracy will require quality training data. Of course with the rate in which AI has been progressing, I’m sure this will change in a very short time.
Now, what about AI stealing jobs? Even before the popularization of AI, mankind have been asking the eternal question of ‘will machines replace ME’. Artists are protesting it when DALL-E shocked the world with its amazing art generation, programmers were thrust into an existential crisis when ChatGPT demonstrated its ability to write basic code.
To answer this simply, I’d like to quote Cleo Abram’s beautiful analogy in her video on AI Music. She intorduces the idea of a gap. There is often a gap between the idea in our heads and what we can realistically create. Often, we end up shrinking our ideas due to the limitations in our technical skill or the tools that we have. It is beneficial to see AI as a super-powered tool to help us bridge this gap. Then comes the gray line of inspiration vs copying, who should get paid, should we judge the impact based on the output or also keep a close eye on the input training portion? But that sounds a lot like 12 years old you listening to a dozen Taylor Swift songs before deciding to write your own songs. This is a deabte for another day but for now, I am excited with all the wonderful things I can do with AI!