You can call me AI

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of initialisms and acronyms. They can be exclusionary.

It bothers me doubly when everyone is talking about AI.

First of all, the term is so vague as to be meaningless. Sometimes—though rarely—AI refers to general artificial intelligence. Sometimes AI refers to machine learning. Sometimes AI refers to large language models. Sometimes AI refers to a series of if/else statements. That’s quite a spectrum of meaning.

Secondly, there’s the assumption that everyone understands the abbreviation. I guess that’s generally a safe assumption, but sometimes AI could refer to something other than artificial intelligence.

In countries with plenty of pastoral agriculture, if someone works in AI, it usually means they’re going from farm to farm either extracting or injecting animal semen. AI stands for artificial insemination.

I think that abbreviation might work better for the kind of things currently described as using AI.

We were discussing this hot topic at work recently. Is AI coming for our jobs? The consensus was maybe, but only the parts of our jobs that we’re more than happy to have automated. Like summarising some some findings. Or perhaps as a kind of lorem ipsum generator. Or for just getting the ball rolling with a design direction. As Terence puts it:

Midjourney is great for a first draft. If, like me, you struggle to give shape to your ideas then it is nothing short of magic. It gets you through the first 90% of the hard work. It’s then up to you to refine things.

That’s pretty much the conclusion we came to in our discussion at Clearleft. There’s no way that we’d use this technology to generate outputs for clients, but we certainly might use it to generate inputs. It’s like how we’d do a quick round of sketching to get a bunch of different ideas out into the open. Terence is spot on when he says:

Midjourney lets me quickly be wrong in an interesting direction.

To put it another way, using a large language model could be a way of artificially injecting some seeds of ideas. Artificial insemination.

So now when I hear people talk about using AI to create images or articles, I don’t get frustrated. Instead I think, “Using artificial insemination to create images or articles? Yes, that sounds about right.”

Pop Culture

Despite all of this hype, all of this media attention, all of this incredible investment, the supposed “innovations” don’t even seem capable of replacing the jobs that they’re meant to — not that I think they should, just that I’m tired of being told that this future is inevitable.

The reality is that generative AI isn’t good at replacing jobs, but commoditizing distinct acts of labor, and, in the process, the early creative jobs that help people build portfolios to advance in their industries.

One of the fundamental misunderstandings of the bosses replacing these workers with generative AI is that you are not just asking for a thing, but outsourcing the risk and responsibility.

Generative AI costs far too much, isn’t getting cheaper, uses too much power, and doesn’t do enough to justify its existence.

New Web Development. Or, why Copilots and chatbots are particularly bad for modern web dev – Baldur Bjarnason

The paradigm shift that web development is entering hinges on the fact that while React was a key enabler of the Single-Page-App and Component era of the web, in practice it normally tends to result in extremely poor products. Built-in browser APIs are now much more capable than they were when React was first invented.

Ideas Aren’t Worth Anything - The Biblioracle Recommends

The fact that writing can be hard is one of the things that makes it meaningful. Removing this difficulty removes that meaning.

There is significant enthusiasm for this attitude inside the companies that produce an distribute media like books, movies, and music for obvious reasons. Removing the expense of humans making art is a real savings to the bottom line.

But the idea of this being an example of democratizing creativity is absurd. Outsourcing is not democratizing. Ideas are not the most important part of creation, execution is.

How do we build the future with AI? – Chelsea Troy

This is the transcript of a fantastic talk called “The Tools We Still Need to Build with AI.”

Absorb every word!

Because There’s No “AI” in “Failure”

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