The Modern Renaissance Man
Use These AI Tools to Become a Master at Any Craft
Hey everyone! I hope y’all had a great week! Last week was officially my first full week in the workforce, and I’ve honestly thoroughly enjoyed it! However, I now understand why some people think you should stay in college as long as you can (disagree with this take, but I see where they’re coming from).
I’m sure many of y’all have recently heard all the buzz online and in the news about some of the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). Most notably, everyone has been raging about Open AI’s Chat GPT, which has surpassed 100 million monthly active users (MAU) faster than any other product ever (including the teen dancing app owned by China). This product is just one of the many revelations in AI that have captured global attention in the last few months.
I got the idea for today’s blog while reading the Differentiation piece from Packy McCormack’s Not Boring Newsletter (subscribe if you haven’t, he def provides so much more than this blog, lol). Here was a quote that everyone should think about when deciding what to do with their life in the next 5–10 years:
Average may not even be employable for long, though, at least in knowledge work. AI is exceptional at average. If something can be taught, it can learn it better. If it can be copied, it can copy it faster…
A few minutes with ChatGPT, despite its flaws and shortcomings, will disavail you of the belief that memorizing things just to memorize them will continue to be valuable. A few minutes with Replit’s Ghostwriter will do the same for your belief in basic coding. Ditto for Lex and writing, or Stable Diffusion and drawing.
The second quote here helped me come up with today’s blog idea. I want to bring back an old concept and mix it with today’s incredible technology to explain how anyone, anywhere (with an internet connection at least) can become an expert in many different disciplines. Let’s dig in!
What is a Renaissance Man?
Before we get into the thick of things, I want to talk about what a “Renaissance Man” is. To do that, I asked Chat GPT to define to me what a Renaissance Man is (fitting isn’t it). Here was its response:
A “Renaissance man” is a term used to describe someone who is highly skilled and knowledgeable in many different areas of study and expertise. The term was first used during the Renaissance period in Europe (14th to 17th centuries) to describe individuals who were well-versed in a wide range of subjects, including the arts, sciences, philosophy, and more.
A Renaissance man was seen as someone who was capable of making significant contributions to many different areas of knowledge and culture. The ideal of the Renaissance man was someone who was well-rounded, curious, and highly intelligent.
Today, the term is still used to describe individuals who have a broad range of knowledge and skills, but it is most often used in a more casual or colloquial sense. For example, someone might refer to themselves as a “Renaissance man” if they are knowledgeable about a variety of topics and have many different hobbies and interests.
Coined by Italian writer and poet Giorgio Vasari in the early 15th century, the term is meant to describe those individuals you met in college, high school, or just in life who seem to be able to do everything and make you question what you’re doing in life as you endlessly scroll social media.
However, with today’s technological advances, particularly in AI, anyone can become what people even just a few decades ago (and especially a few centuries ago when the term was created) would consider a Renaissance Man. The advances in AI will bestow a new technological renaissance in the creative field over the next decade, enabling anyone to become a high-level creator beyond their wildest dreams. If you don’t believe me, here are a few fields that with the help of AI, you can become a master at in just a few hours of work/training TODAY.
Art
When you think of The Renaissance, what is the first thing you immediately think of? Although there were incredible advances in science, philosophy, and more during this period, most people today (by my extremely uneducated guess) would characterize the period with the artistic creations that spawned out of it. Some notable creations include The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, The School of Athens, and of course, the Mona Lisa.
For many people (including myself), the first experience with AI that blew their minds came from Open AI’s DALLE 2.0, which was released last fall. I briefly wrote about this tool in one of my How AI Can Impact Web 3.0 blogs, but what this tool does is create an image based on a string of text a user inputs. Here are a few examples I came up with:
After DALLE was released, other similar products were released from other companies including Lexica and Midjourney which create equally, or even more stunning images (look at a few of these from a Midjourney showcase). Before the power of AI, creating detailed pieces of digital art like this would take a couple of hours (I assume at least; I know it would take me a few days). Now, that time has been cut down to just a few seconds. With a few hours of tinkering, researching the best ways to prompt the AI algorithm, and trial and error, anyone can become a world-class digital artist using these tools.
Writing
Although these AI tools have just started getting tons of widespread media attention, millions have already been using AI for years to improve their writing. Most notably, Grammarly is a tool that many professionals and students heavily rely on (I know I sure as hell did) to edit & correct their spelling & grammatical mistakes. However, some of the new tools now can be used not just to edit your writing, but to basically write for you (good thing I’m not making any money from this blog, I’ve got nothing to lose).
Two tools I’ve used in previous blogs were Lex & Moonbeam, which can take a few notes or bullet points for a blog, essay, technical guide, or more that you want to write and churn out well-written, detailed paragraphs. Another one that is used more professionally is Jasper, which along with the examples mentioned above, can also write product descriptions, Facebook and Google ad headlines, Amazon product descriptions, etc.
With these new AI developments, you can become a better writer than your 8th English teacher who gave you a C- on your final paper made you think. Don’t believe me, then check out this article I recently read in the Guardian from Henry Williams titled, “I’m a copywriter. I’m pretty sure artificial intelligence is going to take my job”. If this professional writer is worried AI will take away his job, then I’m pretty sure that these tools can make you at the very least a decent one.
Media Editing
One thing I’ve gained an appreciation of from creating content while traveling was the skill, patience, and focus needed to be a media (photo, video, etc.) editor. Before being behind the computer and taking hours to make sure the audio and video were lined up perfectly, properly splicing the content, and more, I used to take the 30-second clips on Instagram I watched for granted (my experience). I definitely had one or two moments where I wanted to do this to my laptop:
However, I’ve been able to produce some pieces of content that I never thought possible without extensive training. Using the video editing software Descript, I’ve been able to edit and splice podcasts, create minute-long social media clips of that podcast, and more with just a few hours of tinkering and getting used to the ins and outs of what Descript has to offer (sorry for the blurry camera: straight up my fault, not the software’s).
Descript uses the power of AI to transcribe your audio clips, remove backgrounds, allow users to create a text-to-speech voice of themselves (a tool called Overdub, it’s insane), and more. A few other AI-enabled tools I haven’t used but have heard of that would also fall under this category are PaperCup (audio dubbing) and Runway (a bunch of stuff). Now, within a few hours, you can create and edit content with just a few hours of experience that top-level producers would be jealous of a decade ago.
Coding
I’ve always had some interest in computer science starting in high school when I took some classes in the maker space and messed around with Arduino boards. I even started taking an intro to Javascript class from Alchemy University while I was traveling. However, I very quickly learned (as I have many times previously) that writing code is pretty tough for noobs like me (and I’m sure many people reading this) hence why experience developers are so valuable, especially in a growing field like crypto/web3.
However, with the power of AI, coding is becoming faster, easier, and more fun (not the most fun for me, but I’m sure for people who do it full-time). Most notably, Replit, which last hit a valuation of $800 million, introduced the Replit Ghostwriter, which helps users generate functions and files, gives users suggestions as they code, provides explanations to help people get unstuck, and more.
There are tons of other projects similar to this as well, such as Debuild, which allows you to build web apps with little to no code through the power of AI. Even if you are someone who does not have any technical computer skills (myself included), with enough grunt work, you can make inroads in this skill in a few hours which would take years for new developers just a few years ago.
Knowledge (and Much More)
There is no way this list would be good without adding the new AI product I mentioned earlier in the blog that is taking the whole world by storm: Chat GPT. This incredible product has captivated anyone who has interacted with it. I imagine my first experience using the product had the same shock value that people in 2007 had when they first used the iPhone. If you haven’t heard of Chat GPT or haven’t used it yet, stop reading this blog and start using/interacting with it (seriously…do it…you got this far anyway…more than most people who read the blog, lol).
Tieing this back to the “Renaissance Man” theme, in today’s terms, one would be considered a Renaissance Man if they were knowledgeable about a variety of topics. With Chat GPT, you can get intricate details on a wide range of topics at the touch of your fingertips (FYI, it can do so much more than that as well, but this is just one big user case).
Some may say that was already possible through Google, and we’ve had that tool for over two decades, which is a fair take. However, with Chat GPT, you get the answer you are looking for right away, while on Google, you have to click through possibly 5 different websites to eventually get the info you’re looking for. Furthermore, with Chat GPT, you can specifically ask the bot to provide info to you in a specific way. Here’s an example and a comparison:
Chat GPT reportedly caused a ‘Code Red’ at Google as it significantly challenged its search query monopoly due to its ingenuity. Hence, it’s should be no surprise that this past Friday, Google invested a whopping $400 million into the AI startup Anthropic, which is reportedly creating a rival to Chat GPT. I expect over the next 5 years, there will be lots of competition between rival products which will force all of them to become better and better, which will only benefit the development of this technology. Don’t believe my incredibly uneducated take, you can view this clip from Lex Fridman on a recent Joe Rogan episode that shows how far we’ve already come in this development this quickly.
Conclusion
With this new AI revolution, the ability for anyone to fire up their laptop and begin creating has never been easier. However, two big worries come to mind regarding the impact of this AI tech:
- If you think LinkedIn wasn’t cringy enough already, imagine what people’s headlines are going to look like when they say they are a writer, video editor, artist, software developer, and more because of AI.
2. More and more people are becoming increasingly worried that AI is going to take people’s jobs away. Although I don’t agree with this concern, it’s still commonly brought up.
Now…you may start thinking to yourself, “Am I going to be out of a job in five years?” In the Not Boring Differentiation piece that I mentioned earlier, the author Packy McCormack made this great point:
In the current state of the art, models are only as good as the data they’re trained on and the models can’t generate new training data themselves. AI-generated output is based on the data that trained the AI in the first place, so any data it creates will be a regurgitation of the data it already has. That means that humans will need to create fresh data by coming up with new ideas and new explanations of the world in order for the models to improve.
There’s a very clear way to see how this could lead to a dystopian future in which the AI hires people to generate new art, music, and ideas to fill in the gaps in its understanding, but there’s also a much more hopeful way to view where this is heading.
As the value of things you can teach or copy trends towards zero, the value of fresh new ideas increases.
As the world increasingly makes the shift to utilize AI to its benefit, it will be more important than ever to think creatively and come up with new and original thoughts and ideas. Although the Renaissance Man of the past was rare and was typically applauded for their knowledge and expertise in many fields, the modern version will be widespread and celebrated for their creativity regardless of how many other facts or skills they know.
Hope y’all enjoyed the blog! If you want to fool around with even more AI tools, here are two good lists to look through:
I have a few ideas lined up that I am excited to write about, so look forward to that. Also, I am thinking about switching over to Substack. Although I still plan on writing whatever is on my mind instead of focusing on one specific topic as most Substack newsletters do, I figured it may help grow my blog’s audience and get more people to actually read the blogs. Let me know if you’d like to see it. Otherwise, see y’all next week!
Here are my links if you feel inclined:
