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Technology, Regulation, & Safety
The Time to Act is NOW
“Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” — Werner Heisenberg, in ‘Across the Frontiers’
The Current Landscape
This episode is an update to Episode #82 of my newsletter, a free episode for any/all of my Medium readers.
In that episode, I reviewed two popular artificial intelligence (or “AI”) tools called “Lensa” and “ChatGPT”. It’s worth a read if you’ve not yet seen it because there are now a growing number of popular and powerful AI tools available to the public. I’m grateful for the positive and negative press that these new digital tools are getting because… they are powerful enough to completely change our society.
I promise: I’m not being dramatic. Right now, for example, there are AI tools that can create:
…and more.
The existence of these tools will now certainly and massively impact a wide range of artists and creatives who have long been able to earn a living from their talents. This isn’t just my conclusion: it’s also the conclusion of reporters at the LA Times, Vanity Fair, and Forbes, to name just a few mainstream sources.
For me, in our profit-driven society, the future now seems very clear: businesses will NOT spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire artists or researchers to create work for them when newer AI tools can do it for pennies. Or for free.
Most people have heard about ChatGPT. It’s an LLM or a “Large Language Model” technology. That’s just a fancy term for a website/interface that has been trained by “feeding” it millions of pages of actual human interactions. As a result, when users log in to use the tool, it’s both easy to use and makes using a search engine look instantly outdated.
Take this interaction I had earlier today. Watch what I type in the text bar at the bottom of the screen in real-time, and then watch how INSTANTLY ChatGPT provides me with the information I was seeking in a landslide of text.
