The Friday Thing #814

Good morning, Seattle. Nice to be issuing an early edition...

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The Friday Thing?#814 is back to the topic of AI. I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about AI this week – how to apply it to my work, how to build AI apps, creating PowerPoint presentations to share thoughts on the impact AI may have on the communications profession. And playing around with AI in Photoshop.

If you read edition #812 you saw a bit of that play as my photo of the Bixby Bridge in Big Sur has some AI edits from Photoshop. I wanted the image to be ‘clean’ so I quickly removed a car that was on the bridge and two people in the middle of the shot. I loved the results and playing with the generative AI feature in Photoshop really does feel like magic. ?

I was first made aware of the Photoshop capabilities via this post from @mrgreen who used the expand feature to create new album covers from iconic albums. Adele is below but check out his post for some real gems.

I spent some time playing with the album technique myself but couldn’t come up with anything quite as creative as Lorenzo. Who knows though, maybe this is the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours remix album.

Despite all this fun with AI art, I was reminded this week of so many of the things that AI cannot do.

It can help me build a PowerPoint presentation – but it can’t imbue that PowerPoint with stories from the heart, with emotional impact. It can help me learn about people, but not in the way I learn when sitting in a room with them all day, listening to them share stories, watching the chemistry as they sketch on a whiteboard and observing how they light up on different topics. It can find me a restaurant with great food I will love, but it can’t explain the sensation of smelling and tasting that food – or hand me a plate as a simple gesture of friendship. It can tell me a story, but not clink a glass and laugh as the punchline is delivered and roll back in a chair, laughing out loud. The list goes on…

As much as I’m excited about all the things I’ll get to do with AI over the coming months and years – I end this week, even more excited about human connection because that is real magic.

That’s all for this week. Happy Friday.

Oh, and the music for this week is The Chain by Fleetwood Mac.

?-Steve