ai

AI models are now useful to me personally and professionally. In This Essay, I will introduce some AI models available in Spring 2023, explain what they’re good at, and describe how to experiment with them if you’re interested.

Some things AI can do right now:

  • Create professional-quality art in minutes or seconds*

  • Summarize complex fields or answer technical questions*

  • Write reasonable lyrics, essays, emails extremely fast*

On impulse, here is an interesting multihistorical pastiche I made doing some experiments for work:

Hmm. I like it…but what if we added a little more drama??

Yeah, image gen AIs can be rabbit holes. Anyways…

If you want to try out text AIs, I recommend:

  • Ask a few questions on something you’re knowledgeable about. This should give a sense of where it makes mistakes, how well it emphasizes importance, etc.

  • Ask some questions on something you’d like to learn about. I’ve found it very useful as a tutor

  • Ask it to remix some stuff. “Write a rap about bananas in the style of Shakespeare.” There are some kinds of creativity it’s pretty good at, “X in the style of Y” is one of them.

Some recommended places to play around:

- Text generators:

  • Poe app (iOS). Free, lets you switch between chatGPT and 5 other language models. Can pay for subscription and use GPT4, which is probably better but not necessary.

  • chatGPT standard interface (https://chat.openai.com/chat). Can pay for GPT4 access.

  • Bing chat (short waitlist) GPT4 accessible from Bing browser (web or mobile). Currently rate limited.

- Image generators:

  • Leonardo.ai (short waitlist). Lets you try out 10+ different generation models, currently free, easily the best UI and image generation models I’ve used so far.

  • Midjourney (discord bot, $10/mo, UI a little confusing at first) Also very good image generation, different style from Leonardo

  • dall-e (https://openai.com/product/dall-e-2) Free credits come with openAI account, a little behind the others in quality right now.

I imagine you getting bored about now so here’s another picture. You can stop reading anytime you want though, this won’t be on the test.

Some tips on Text AIs:

Keeping a particular frame / relationship in mind will probably help you come up with stuff to ask them about.

One frame I keep coming back to is that chatGPT and GPT4 are like slightly below-average, slightly brown-nosing college freshmen who have read literally everything ever written and have a basic understanding of all of it.

Another is a smart but slightly unreliable tutor, able to talk about anything but overconfident sometimes.

The last I’ve found useful is that they’re very “creative” in the sense of being able to generate a certain type of idea (“give me some unusual sport earbud feature ideas”) or mimicking styles (“essay about ninja turtles in the style of Chaucer”). Good for well-defined problems.

They also give slightly smarter results if told something like “Pretend you are famous physicist Erwin Schrödinger. How you you explain ____ concept in physics to a relative beginner?”

I’m no expert, but happy to answer questions if you have any.

*Art generators will not understand what you want, so will often take multiple rounds of sampling before you’re happy with the results.

*They will also hallucinate incorrect results, maybe 10-15% of the time? How much depends on context, but they are currently overconfident.

*I don’t’ type that fast. Also you will definitely want to read + edit any writing they create for sure right now

I wanna see the home page

Made on mmm