Recent advancements in AI have left a lot of creative people worried. Myself included.

However, as a stubborn optimist and a technology geek, I find myself torn between worry and excitement.

On one hand, I worry that more as AI technologies like ChatGPT continue to advance at rapid pace my value as a writer might diminish quite quickly.

On the other hand, I believe that these are just tools to help create even better value for my clients and our societies.

So which will it be?

Experimentation in Progress

I do a lot of experimenting in my work. From building mobile air quality sensors, developing IOT sensors, creating devices to bring families closer together to ways to do more good in business, automatically.

So I though I'd try out some of the AI tools to see how good they are, and test them on you.

AI Images

One such experiment was with DALL·E 2 to come up with an image for this post.

Starting with the prompt "sustainability and technology in a cybernetic style" I developed four initial images (as shown in the header image of this post).

I really like the second image, but I'm not sure I yet know what "ernebiogy" actually is.

The first image, however, is probably a more accurate representation of what I was trying to achieve - the interconnectedness of all things on our planet - so I dug deeper into that and had DALL·E 2 create these variations on the theme.

Below are a few generations that followed that line of thinking. Through this progression my prompt also evolved to include words like "interconnected" and "humans", "biodiversity" and "environment".

Most of them were jumbled images with nonsense words thrown in, but quite quickly I was able to converge on something that is actually quite good.

Observations

The last image in the series is almost exactly what I was looking for.

I say almost, because like humans, DALL·E 2 put humans in the centre of the picture with everything else dependent on us - a false assumption that has led us to a rather bothersome place today.

In this scenario DALL·E 2 upskilled me, giving me a level or artistic capability I don't naturally have. My natural graphic capabilities are clumsy, brute force and not particularly good. Yet within a fairly short time I was able to cajole DALL·E 2 into generating an image I actually quite like.

Of course, if I was serious about generating an image like this without AI, I might have hired a professional graphic artist. But then again, I might not have even bothered in the first place because there was no real gain or point of this other than an experiment.

If, though, this image was going to be used in a serious piece of customer work, would I be happy enough with the AI version?

Well that depends on budget I suppose. If I had very little or no budget, then this would be good enough. But, if I wanted to make a really good impression with a lasting piece of work then I think I might use this image as a stimulus when engaging a graphic artist.

With that in mind, perhaps technologies like this could help break down barriers between different types of people, and actually bring new work to creatives from people who might otherwise have felt too intimidated or unsure to begin to engage with them?

AI Written Content

There are currently four articles on this website that have been (mostly) written by AI tools, my challenge to you is can you spot them?

I've used a selection of some of the more popular tools, including some powered by ChatGPT.

My initial thought is "it's ok" but I had to heavily edit each of the articles to make them more readable.

I'll be doing more experiments with AI for the written word, so stay tuned.

More To Come

This is just the beginning. I'll continue to explore this topic, so sign up for our newsletters to keep up to date.