AI out for your jobs? Seems Unlikely.
Damnit! I wanna retire!!!
Artificial Intelligence, when these two words are used together we often imagine a robot with a head that reveals all the electronic witchcraft within its skull. Sound familiar? Well, I just described Sophia, as an attempt to give artificial intelligence a human interface. However, humanity has made leaps and bounds since 2016 in AI technology. Have we come closer to Skynet? Will our jobs be replaced by them? Will I be invited to a Chopper? Let’s answer these questions by seeing the advancements of AI that gave rise to ChatGPT and DALL-E who are probably out to replace our jobs! Or are they?
If you have eyes, you’ve probably seen people post art that was made by an “AI”. The majority of it comes from the likes of DALL-E and Midjourney. These can construct completely unique works using machine learning and a host of self-learning algorithms. However, it cannot do so without help. To train them a human person has to approve what constitutes art or how to create art. Through this initial learning phase, it can learn at an unprecedented rate by analyzing a HUMONGOUS database of images, paintings, patterns, and other existing artworks. It analyzes but it does not understand (more on that later). After doing so, it mixes and matches features after receiving a prompt to achieve the desired output of images. Some examples are shown below.
However, humans don't use art just to look at it, they use it for business reasons as well. So as an experiment, we told some popular AI artists to create a logo for Yellow Raptor. The prompt we gave attempts to give as much detail as possible regarding the brand and how the illustration should be. Also, it's important to note, that this was done in a free version of the AI artists, it's important to assume that maybe in the paid versions the illustrations could have been much more consistent with the prompt.
Prompt: “2D flat logo design for a fun-loving, energetic and upbeat branding studio called Yellow Raptor, Use colors that reflect those features and the design must reflect them as well”.
Interestingly, you can actually see that the AI has browsed through previous databases as the colors that it used reflects the ones we’ve used. Furthermore, they took the ‘Raptor’ word seriously and attempted to portray a sort of dinosaur appearance rather than focus on the emotions evoked. This is an example of specialized intelligence where the AI does what it is told to do but it cannot go beyond that. We’ve made people choose between the AI-generated logo and the logo made by a human person, and 100% of the people asked chose the human-made logo as the better one.
So it's time to answer the million-dollar question. Will AI replace your seat at the workplace? Yes and No! Let me explain, some jobs such as filing in reports and data-entry jobs or other menial tasks that have great room for automation or where humans have to press a series of buttons will probably be replaced. However, because of the complex nature of AI, many more jobs will be created. Furthermore, AI is mostly out to assist humans in their work. For example, before writing this blog post, I had no idea what to write about. There were a million aspects I could have covered but my indecision contributed to my anxiety. That's where ChatGPT came and became my best friend. I asked it to write a draft of the article and it did so in very good English and had some great content. However, I did not copy-paste the article as it has not understood my writing style yet and I can't get it to do so.
Nevertheless, if the future is scary for you or bright for you it's probably one of the best times to upskill yourself with all the new cool skills that are hip nowadays. You have time to learn coding to code functions into AI or make an AI from scratch even! Or you can take up creative skills such as design as well. Similarly, how the internal combustion engine revolutionized the transport industry and people had to learn how to drive to earn money, AI is also a revolution so you must upskill yourself and keep up with technology.
Written by Muqaddim Jawad Noor
References:
Wikipedia contributors. (2023, January 12). Sophia (robot). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)
DALL·E: Creating Images from Text. (2022, June 9). OpenAI. https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/
Stable Diffusion Online. (n.d.). https://stablediffusionweb.com/
Runway - Next-generation creation suite | Everything you need to make content, fast. (n.d.). https://runwayml.com/
Deep Dream Generator. (n.d.). https://deepdreamgenerator.com/
🤖 🖼 AI Art Generator, AI Art Maker. (n.d.). NightCafe Creator. https://creator.nightcafe.studio/
Photosonic AI Art Generator | Create Unique Images with AI. (n.d.). https://photosonic.writesonic.com/
DeepAI. (n.d.). https://deepai.org/
