Playing with AI

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So I finally found the time to explore the available AI tools and I have to admit, I’m impressed.

I’m pretty favorable towards adopting new tools that enhance the way we work, even if there are potential pitfalls, but I’m a slow adopter for AI as it’s been hard to access here in China. But now that I’ve gained access and started to play around it’s clear to me that using AI to enhance my work will be a huge game changer.

I’m particularly excited about how the image creation function, in the hands of a skilled prompter, can help those of us that are not visual creatives communicate our ideas in more compelling ways than ever before. I work with many scientists and engineers that have brilliant ideas but they aren’t able to express them effectively to marketing and they get lost in translation. Now it doesn’t matter if you can’t draw – you can still “show” your idea with example AI generated imagery. It won’t be perfect and will still require a human touch to refine, but it greatly increases our ability to communicate visually.

I recognize that AI will impact some people’s jobs directly. In our case we used to hire sketch artists to join our innovation workshops to help visualize ideas. I see AI as replacing this need. However, we will still need artists to refine final concepts and work with our scientist/engineers to make sure the output is technically and scientifically accurate. In fact, I expect we will have more work for artists to refine as we democratize access to visual creation through AI generation. We’ll have more ideas that need to be fully realized. Perhaps, I’m being naive, but I see more upside than down at this point.

I’ve done less playing around with written content generation. I asked Microsoft CoPilot to generate a PowerPoint deck all about how to use AI for creative inspiration and design. The output was OK. Not very compelling but a good base to start with. I took the output and worked interactively with it to develop a final product that I can actually use that was probably 50% AI generated and 50% human supported. One interesting finding was that the original AI generated content didn’t include any of the watch outs or negative aspects of using AI. I had to specifically ask this to be added. After I asked it did make some decent points although I still augmented it with my own thoughts.

At this point, you would think I should include some example of my AI play here in the post. But I’m hesitant to introduce AI content in my blog. This is my place to be creative. My place to be human. To be vulnerable and fallible. I’m not yet comfortable to bring AI into this affair. Perhaps I’m not as open minded as I like to think.

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Be well,

Monty

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