This AI-fuelled creative assistant is a glimpse at the future of knowledge work.
This is an extract from?New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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I’ve been writing regularly on the incredible advances being made by AI generative models. Recently, in New Week #101, that meant news from Google on its?incredible new text-to-video tools, Imagen and Phenaki.
We’re amid a revolution that’s seeing AI and human creativity collide, and?NWSH?is obsessed.
This week, one Twitter user offered us a glimpse of what that collision may come to look like in practice. He hacked together an AI-fuelled design assistant that turns spoken ideas into amazing images:
The tech stack here?
This designer used The MetaHuman Creator from Epic Games to create the assistant’s avatar. OpenAI’s Whisper handles the speech recognition, and GPT-3, also from OpenAI, is the model that’s fuelling language competence. Finally, the text to image model Stable Diffusion generates the illustrations.
Put it all together and the result is something close to magic. A virtual human that can generate and refine any image at your whim, in seconds.
? NWSH?Take:?
Taken alone, none of this is new;?NWSH?has covered the MetaHuman Creator, GPT-3, and Stable Diffusion extensively across the last 12 months. But tie all those tools together — and use Whisper voice-to-text to create a seamless UX — and we get a glimpse of fast-approaching future.
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In short, this is a snapshot of a possible and fast-approaching future of work for designers and a wide range of other creative and knowledge professionals, from architects, to web developers, to writers. Those workers will constantly spar with and iterate the work of AI-fuelled assistants that can generate endless drafts and revisions.
That shift turns every creative professional into the boss of their own hyper-productive output factory. Want a glimpse of the work we can expect? Take a look at this animated anime music video,?created in under 12 hours using Stable Diffusion.
The upshot? Standard issue ‘good design’ and many other kinds of creative output — from copywriting to code — will be commoditised. That doesn't mean excellence in these creative fields will become any less valued.
Photography can be a useful analogue here. Anyone can take a photo. Billions are taken every day, and the vast majority are unremarkable. But a tiny number of photographs, taken by skilled artists, are deemed to be highly culturally and financially valuable. We'll see something similar with the creative outputs of AI generative models. Most of those outputs, created by most of us, will exist in an unremarkable, 'meh' middle ground. A few, created by elite craftspeople, will be highly prized.
The other implication, then, for the future of knowledge and creative work? Top tier creatives will need to learn to pilot generative models better than the Average Joe.?AI whispering?is about to become a whole lot more important.
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You've just read an extract from this week's?New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
Also in this week's instalment:
?? Google showcase more work in their quest to create an all-purpose helper robot that we can talk to.
...and much more!