Welcome to Artificial Ignorance! I’m cautiously optimistic about starting this journey and exploring the exciting world of generative AI together.
Why start this newsletter?
Well, for starters, I find generative AI fascinating. For the last few years, I’ve been working at the intersection of digital content creators and e-commerce. As a result, I’ve had a firsthand look at AI’s potential applications, both creative and commercial.
The field is evolving at an insanely fast pace, and it’s difficult to keep up. This newsletter gives me an excuse to stay up to date on the latest news and to collect my thoughts on the implications of everything.
What exactly is generative AI?
At its core, it’s all about using machine learning algorithms to generate new content, from text and images to music and even entire websites. The underlying techniques and models are quite different, but they share the goal of using AI to create content from scratch. There are, of course, open questions on the morality and legality of these techniques, which I’m sure we’ll dive into.
One of the most exciting (or terrifying, depending on your point of view) things about generative AI is how fast the field is advancing. While the field has been marching forward the last few years, the last year in particular has been a whirlwind. We’ve seen the launch of ChatGPT, which can generate coherent and convincing text that can be hard to distinguish from something written by a human. We’ve seen Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, AI algorithms that can generate stunning works of art with the right prompt. And the field continues to expand, with models for software, visual design, human voices, music, and more on the horizon.
Of course, there are philosophical and cultural questions to consider. As generative AI becomes more advanced, what does it mean for the future of work and creativity? Will GPT models make marketing better or drown us in an ocean of AI spam? How do classrooms, bosses, and internet moderators police against content generated by AI? Or should they even bother? These are difficult questions that I hope to explore.
What can you expect from this newsletter?
Each week, I’ll be sharing all the latest and greatest in the world of generative AI, from groundbreaking new research to interesting real-world applications and everything in between. I’ll also dive deeper into some of the non-technical implications of generative AI. There may be some more technology-heavy discussions, but they’ll be targeted at a non-technical audience. I’m also open to suggestions and feedback! Everything is still so new, and we’re all finding our bearings in real time.
Let’s get started!