Is generative AI the end or the beginning?

On the one hand, human creativity is often rooted in personal experience, emotion and imagination. Humans have the ability to use a wide range of sensory information and life experiences to generate new ideas and create original works of art or design. This process often involves complex decision making, intuition, and an element of spontaneity that is difficult to replicate with machines.

On the other hand, generative AI has demonstrated a remarkable ability to create new and unique content that is often indistinguishable from human-generated content. Using machine learning algorithms and neural networks, generative AI can analyze vast amounts of data and learn to create new content based on patterns and trends in that data. This has led to the creation of AI-generated art, music and literature, which are often praised for their originality and creativity.

Of course, generative AI still has some limitations. Although it creates new content based on a set of inputs, it may have difficulty generating truly original and innovative ideas that go beyond what people have already seen or done. Additionally, generative AI lacks the emotional and contextual understanding that human creativity often involves, which can limit its ability to create truly meaningful and impactful work.

Watching the use of various generative artificial intelligence systems spread like wildfire, one cannot help but wonder how this will affect employment. That is, the huge number of people who today are busy creating this very content for a salary, what will happen to them? This topic has been discussed on the Internet for a relatively long time and seems to have received an answer - yes, some specialties associated with routine work will disappear, but the need for solving complex creative problems will remain with the person. However, looking at the works created by ChatGPT, DALL-E and Midjourney, I personally have doubts about this.

Generative AI allows completely unsophisticated users, often without extensive professional training, to demonstrate new levels of creativity and innovation that were previously impossible because they required extensive training and the ability to work with complex applications ranging from product design to music composition and healthcare.

The opportunities that generative AI provides are already threatening to revolutionize a number of areas. Below are a few examples and they do not exhaust all possibilities.

Graphic design. Generative AI can be used to create new designs based on a set of input parameters, such as color schemes, layout settings, and image styles. This can save designers a significant amount of time and help them create more creative and unique designs. For example, Adobe Sensei uses artificial intelligence to generate new designs in this way.

Composing music. Generative AI can be used to create new music based on parameters such as genre preferences, tempo, and key. This helps musicians generate new ideas and explore different styles of music. Amper Music writes new melodies based on input parameters.

Writing texts and creating content. By giving the system a set of input parameters, such as style, tone, and theme, you get coherent text without grammatical errors. This can save authors a significant amount of time and help them create more unique and creative content. For example, GPT-3 creates text in a few seconds, which would take a person much longer to even type this text on a computer.

Architecture. In the field of architecture, generative AI can be used to create new building designs by specifying parameters such as size, shape and function. It helps architects explore different design options and formulate new ideas. Dreamcatcher creates new building designs based on a set of input parameters.

Visual effects and animation. Generative AI creates new visuals and animations based on style, motion, and color. For example, Houdini intelligence can create new visual effects and animations.

In this case, what place should a person take in creativity, and what place should artificial intelligence take?

Shortly after OpenAI's ChatGPT was released in November 2022, Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of education company Coursera Inc., decided to test the technology to see if it could save him time.

He started using a chatbot to compose company emails and notes and asked his executive assistant to try the same thing to compose responses to incoming emails. “I end up being able to spend a lot more time thinking and a lot less time writing,” Mr. Maggioncalda says.

Around the world, business people from a variety of industries, including architecture, software and entertainment, are testing this new technological frontier.

In the past, AI was hidden inside enterprise information systems, performing functions like optimizing operations or automating content moderation. Now, apps like ChatGPT and the Midjourney image generator have put the technology directly into the hands of individuals and small businesses. They are empowered to use generative AI themselves to automate time-consuming tasks or accelerate creative processes.

Other people don't worry about efficiency and productivity. They enjoy being able to do things that were previously impossible for them. Social media is filled with excited examples of the results of AI creativity.

The surge of hype around generative AI has attracted the attention of large corporations. It is obvious that in the near foreseeable future this technology can make a revolution similar to the beginning of the era of personal computing machines. And companies need not to miss that moment, after which it will be too late, and competitors will be far ahead. Although generative AI has not yet reached the maturity required for use in the systems of large corporations, some companies have already begun to experiment with generative AI.

Thus, it seems that generative AI can take everyone who wants to use it to the next level. However, AI experts warn that to use it effectively, you need to have professional knowledge in the relevant field.

“The purpose it serves is not to inform you about things you don't know. It's a tool that allows you to get better at what you already know how to do,” says Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics officer at Hugging Face, a startup that provides a machine learning platform.

Telmo Gomez, co-founder and CIO of Melbourne, Australia-based LiveSense, said ChatGPT saves him significant time. After his company received an order to develop a system for detecting smoking in public places, he spent a lot of time searching for effective sensors to perform this task. There was very little information and it was very scattered.

He then entered the question into ChatGPT. Within a few seconds, the system produced several answers, including some that accurately reflected the solutions he needed. “It completely blew me away,” Mr. Gomes said. “We are a small company. This will allow us to do more with less."

Nidhi Hegde, a designer at Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo, a major architecture firm specializing in luxury hotel services, envisions generative AI will change her profession. One of her clients sent concept sketches of a building that his team created with Midjourney's help.

Sketches provided by the customer are unusual. Traditionally, they are created by an architect based on the client’s technical specifications. However, Hegde decided to use them. She entered the client's images back into Midjourney and asked the program to create several new variations with different structures while maintaining a similar design. Customers loved the final version, she said.

“The role of the architect is changing,” she says. “As an industry, we will have to rethink what services we provide.”

At the headquarters of drilling company Devon Energy in Oklahoma, management decided to take a closer look at the use of ChatGPT. A group of technicians showed that they could use the tool to test computer code to automate the control of equipment in oil fields.

The company's engineers and scientists began using the tool to summarize large technical documents. The company hopes that one day ChatGPT will be able to crawl through academic repositories and summarize, say, a hundred scientific papers on hydrogen into a short report. For many people, this feature will be a huge time saver.

Lucas Winterbottom, a software engineer at Hong Kong fintech startup Reap, began using Copilot, an AI programming assistant built on an earlier version of ChatGPT's core technology, in mid-2022. He uses it daily to speed up common programming tasks, switching to ChatGPT to help with less common coding problems.

According to him, ChatGPT also helps him carry out 90% work on compiling internal company documentation. “I’m a techie,” he says. “I don’t really like writing.”

Many white-collar and creative professionals fear that when generative AI advances enough, he will replace them just as robots have replaced factory jobs. The penetration of generative artificial intelligence will definitely change the process of performing many tasks and will require changes in qualifications. Humans are more likely to play the role of providing the ideas, cultural context, and conceptual direction for AI work.

Cynthia Ting, an architect at US firm NBBJ, says she has seen Midjourney spread like wildfire among her peers. She is working with the Hong Kong chapter of the American Institute of Architects to create a think tank to help architects learn how to use generative AI and other technologies.

Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize many industries and professions. Individual professionals in the fields of graphic design, music composition, literature, content creation, architecture, visual effects, and animation will benefit from using generative AI in their work. They will be able to work more efficiently, produce more creative content, and ultimately achieve better results.

Overall, the competition between human creativity and generative AI is complex and multifaceted. While there are certainly areas in which generative AI can surpass humans, there are also many areas where human creativity remains indispensable. As the field of generative AI continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how it shapes and complements human creativity across industries and professions.

«Генеративный ИИ предназначен не для замены человеческого творчества, а для его расширения и открытия новых уровней инноваций». — Фей-Фей Ли, содиректор Стэнфордского института искусственного интеллекта, ориентированного на человека.

The article was written using materials WSJ