Don't Fear Creative AI: Embrace It

Well, that's all folks. Creative AI has is here and it's going to be able to write articles, code, and even create images.

The AI nightmare has arrived: it's going to eliminate all of these jobs.

Over the last few years, the primary line of thinking was that AI will take over the low to medium skilled jobs first.

Chances are that you have seen this at your local supermarket,?parking garage , or fast food chain. Automation appears there in the form of automated lot attendants and touch screen powered self-checkouts and self-ordering kiosks.

But, we were told, that the high skilled jobs that involve "soft skills" like writing or creativity were safe for now and likely many more years to come. We were told to future proof ourselves by focusing on the skills that involved creativity. It was "Learn to Code 2.0."

Humans can't catch a break

Brilliant minds were even suggesting that a new AI Winter was upon us and that only quantum computing would heat things up again . Given that quantum computing was still a few years off, it would give humanity and society a chance to adapt to better and better AI.

But, 2022 changed all that. First, it was VQGANs making halfway decent artwork based on a text prompt. Sure the images had a little weirdness about them. Some strange artifacts, like faces appearing out of nowhere and the occasional third arm. But all things considered, it was impressive.

Then came Dall-E-2 and it was good.

Really good. Award winning good .

Then, if that weren't enough, ChatGPT came out in late November. Technical people were impressed by it, then the general public caught wind of it. Then the prognosticators of doom spoke about the end of many careers .

The Creative Class was no longer safe. The smug notion of "only humans can be creative" was proven false in a quiet but jarring way just as the holiday season started. The Creative Class started writing articles about the end of their jobs. Doom and gloom. Dogs and cats living together.

Game over, man! Game Over!

"How do I get started with AWS Sagemaker?"

ChatGPT came out while I was in Las Vegas working on last minute alterations to my presentation for re:Invent. I was heads down, but did hear whispers of how impressive it was.

I didn't get a chance to check it out until I was at the airport waiting to leave Sin City. I asked it a question and my mind was blown.

I asked it a simple question that was on my mind after swimming in AWS kool aid for about a week: "How do I get started with AWS Sagemaker?" After having made chatbots, keeping up with the latest in NLP, I expected a fairly coherent answer, but did not expect a cogent one.

A little later, I used some other AI magic to bring the answer to (virtual) life.

I was blown away. I asked questions and it answered in a way that sounded human. It did have a certain style to it that makes it recognizable. The style was subtle and it is still hard to define, but apparently someone has figured it out already .

Now is not the time for fear. That comes later.

In the weeks since I first used ChatGPT, I now see it as an invaluable tool. Writer's block is a lot easier to beat when you have a tool like ChatGPT at your side. While struggling to write a quick synopsis of a movie, I asked the AI to explain the movie and its plot. It did. I took the output, modified it a bit, and then continued to write.

In the past, this would have stopped my writing flow and gotten me out of the zone. This is, after all, a book I have been trying to write for 18 months or so. So, I know the pattern.

1. Have an idea
2. Write
3. Get stuck on thing
4. Get distracted
5. Abandon the writing project

ChatGPT let me flip the script, so to speak, and I kept writing.

ChatGPT makes a Great Exoskeleton

As if this article didn't already have enough movie references, I'll add one more. In the 1986 sci-fi movie Aliens, Ellen Ripley made use of a mechanical exoskeleton to load boxes and defeat the xenomorph queen using an exoskeleton originally designed for loading heavy cargo.

Loading tons of cargo or defeating deadly alien creatures in a direct fistfight was not something Ripley could do without the right augmentation. She needed the exoskeleton to boost her strength and power. She was still driving the machine.

And so it is with tools like Dall-E-2 and ChatGPT. The productivity boost I get from using them is nothing short of next level awesome. Creative blocks are a thing of the past. Procrastination is also somewhat defeated.

About two years ago, I wrote a tool called Dingo that simplifies the blog posting process. I wrote in C# as a command line tool and have been meaning to get around to porting it to Python. By "meaning to," I meant it was on my list of to do items, but always fell back to the bottom of the list.

On New Year's Day, I described what Dingo does and asked Chat GPT how to write a program to do that in Python. It spit out code. It wasn't perfect, but it did provide an outline and somewhere to start.

The next day, I had feature parity with the .NET Core version of Dingo. A few days more, I had a GUI written in Tkinter, complete with data binding. Tkinter made a GUI that worked the same on my Mac as any of my PCs.

The original version of Dingo took about a month to write in my spare time. DingoPy, as I'm calling it, took about two days to hit feature parity and around two weeks to write what I always wanted to create.

ChatGPT was there every step of the way.

"How do I create a drop down list in Tkinter?"

"How do I make oAuth connection to YouTube API?"

"How do I create a virtual environment?"

No question was too dumb and it was more efficient than sifting through answers on StackOverflow or dodging pop ups on various other "help" sites.

ChatGPT and I slayed the problem like Ripley did the alien queen.

It makes for a great exoskeleton, just remember who is driving it.