Ahead of us is Tracy Jackson, who runs a blog called The Marketing Amateur. I posed the same question to him, whether AI chatbots are going to take our jobs. “Never say never,” he said. “It still needs guidance, but never say never.” Before he started using the AI chatbot, a blog post would take him two days. It takes two hours now, he said. (That is, if the Wi-Fi works well; suddenly the amorous poems we’ve been waiting in line for due to shoddy internet connections are no longer an option.)
I returned to the stage area in time to hear a panel of CEOs, led by venture capitalist Sameer Dholakia, ponder how the new era of artificial intelligence will reshape business. Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, noted that his company’s text-to-image model went from taking 5.6 seconds to generate an AI image last August to now generating 40 AI images per second. “These models are actually highly unoptimized,” Mostaque said. “We’re just getting started.” After the panel, Anya Singh, who has worked on Google’s search products for nearly 16 years, eagerly showed me the website of a company she’s invested in, called NeuroPixel.ai. It generates photorealistic synthetic images of human clothing models for $1 a shot. Another company Singh is involved with, REImagine Home, takes photos of your well-worn home space and spits out chic AI-generated decor.
“I’ve been trying to use the internet to decorate my house since September, but it feels really bad,” Singh told me. She’s making vision boards and designing rooms piecemeal. The cost is estimated to be thousands of dollars per room, and the design still “doesn’t have the gestalt of the whole house or my budget or requirements.” Singer says REImagine home doesn’t solve all of these problems, but it removes some of the friction. “I like to think it makes an inefficient system better.”
That’s enough to make any graphic artist, fitting model, or interior designer shudder. or is it?Kevin Rose New York Times FOLO, the fear of impending obsolescence, has clouded our collective vision of an AI-infused future, the columnist, speaking at a GenAI event, said. Jobs that are extremely social, experiential, or manual still require a human touch. Humans are safe. Of course, Roose said it with considerable confidence two days before Microsoft’s new AI chatbot told him it wanted to be alive, insisted on loving him, and spewed out a series of hypothetical destructive fantasies.
Jordan Harrod, an AI educator and doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the GenAI audience that “at the end of the day, when it comes to how we fit into the equation, the answer is relationships. The human element is very important.” AI-generated image of two people holding hands with the words “Human Connection” on the left side of the image. The creepy images show four wrists, two hands, and at least a dozen fingers. It’s jarring. It’s also reassuring, if only temporarily.
