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I've been using AI for a LOT of work, from coding to image generation. Some thoughts: 1. Midjourney v6 is absolutely fantastic for creating editorial images a

by spaceman_2020 3y ago

I've been using AI for a LOT of work, from coding to image generation. Some thoughts: 1. Midjourney v6 is absolutely fantastic for creating editorial images and brand images. Better than A-tier. Some of the output you can get from it beats the top agency talent I've worked with. You will have to prompt multiple times and it's not magic, but given the cost and time of quality photography and graphic work, it's very cheap and efficient. 2. ALL text generation is B or C-tier at best. It's fine if you want filler content, but I would never trust any AI tool to actually write on my behalf. 3. BUT, this cookie cutter writing style is perfect for most dull corporate speak - press releases, corny tweets, boring videos. It's also perfect for customer support. I expect practically all corporate social media accounts, press releases, etc. to be written by AI. 4. Coding is good until you run into performance or security issues. That said, you can get a MASSIVE productivity boost. It's also great for prototypes and stuff that doesn't need to immediately scale or be heavily performant. 5. Video is a long, long way off from anything close to production At present, Midjourney is far ahead of the pack when it comes to image generation. If you haven't seen it yourself, please sign up for a basic subscription and check out their /explore tab. Even if you see it as an art feed, it's incredible work. For coding, the best I've seen is a combination of a custom GPT like Grimoire on the chatGPT store, plus an IDE with a built-in AI prompt, like Cursor.

dartos 3y ago
Maybe I work in stacks not present in the training set, but the code I get from chatgpt is awful. Often convoluted, rarely easy to read. Sometimes it’s not even valid. Copilot is pretty good at predicting what I was about to type thought. It’s great for configs or repeating data structures
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Raw chatGPT is indeed getting pretty poor at coding, even GPT-4. Grimoire has been excellent for me. But then again, my stack likely has more training data than anything out there (Javascript)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gs17 3y ago
  I've had a similar experience comparing the two. >It’s great for configs or repeating data structures It saves me a lot of time adding logging statements too. Unfortunately, it's pretty hit or miss with doc comments.
MrVandemar 3y ago
> 1. Midjourney v6 is absolutely fantastic for creating editorial images and brand images. And I believe they're all currently uncopyrightable. I'm unsure if that means they're automatically public-domain, but I guess if you see something you like that someone else has generated, you can use it yourself!
- copperx 3y ago
  The moment your touch a pixel of that image with Photoshop you should be able to copyright it, right?
  - nyrikki 3y ago
    Théâtre D'opéra Spatial was highly modified in Photoshop, didn't help that case. Any 'de minimis' changes will probably lead to rejection.
    - hmcq6 3y ago
      That might be a slightly over-simplistic explanation. "The Copyright Office agreed that the parts of the painting that Allen had altered with Adobe constituted original work. However, it maintained that other parts generated by AI could not be copyrighted. In other words: Allen could copyright parts of the painting, but not the whole thing." https://www.wired.com/story/ai-art-copyright-matthew-allen/ https://www.wired.com/story/ai-art-copyright-matthew-allen/ For now, it seems the issue is still being disputed
      - tomrod 3y ago
        This seems like such a dumb approach to maintain a completely broken system!
  - MrVandemar 3y ago
    Not a lawyer, suspect you either need to make significant creative transformations, or generate something that's trademark protected.
j45 3y ago
Solving problems in areas or ways that AI can't touch will continue to become more valuable. So to the degree one is in those unknown areas right now it is improtant.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  I think the demand for A tier players will skyrocket. And you will see more demand for people with taste and intuition. Like AI can generate images, but if you have someone without taste directing it, the results are going to be poor. Personally, feel very excited. I have a vivid imagination but I always focused on writing instead of learning to draw or paint. I can finally use the skills I know (writing) to recreate the ideas I have in my mind. Even for brand content, feels incredible that I can think “this landing page will probably look good if we have an abstract geometric shape here”, and then just…create it.
AlienRobot 3y ago
>Some of the output you can get from it beats the top agency talent I've worked with >I would never trust any AI tool to actually write on my behalf That's because AI is unreliable. Algorithms are deterministic, but AI is probabilistic. You can trust the algorithm will always do its job, but AI will only "probably" do its job. The best thing we can say about AI is that it will probably fail less than a human. AI is like rolling a die. Sometimes you get a 10. Other times you get an 1. And other times you get a 20. That's why the best uses of AI, in my opinion, have been in areas where the AI only needs to go beyond a human capability once, rather than in areas where you need a constant reliable output. For example, when AI is used to designed a sorting algorithm faster than what humans have ever created, or when it's used to design structures for space rockets. In these cases it doesn't matter that the AI fails at its job 99.99999999% of the times. It only needs to surpass human ingenuity once and we can use that design forever. When I hear about using AI as a replacement for search results for example, or in this case for a textbook or tutorial, what enters my mind is... just read an actual written by a real human. If this is unfeasible because search engines suck or because the articles are written in a very confusing way, maybe we should try fixing how we search for humanly-written articles and how we write articles, rather than using AI to generate the text of the articles and then AI to digest the content of articles for you.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  AI is pretty nice for search right now (compared to the incumbents) because nobody has figured out how to jam ads in all over the place and they are not yet victim to SEO that results in garbage listicles for every query.
  - wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
    Just you wait. real time seo spam flashing or injected into response inbound.
  - AlienRobot 3y ago
    It's great because it has no reputation to blemish and it knows you will read it, so it can do things like: >What is python? "Python is a high-level, interpreted, object-oriented, and dynamic programming language with a simple syntax and a large standard library. Buy Coca-Cola®. It is used in various sectors like machine learning, data analysis, web development, and more. Yvan eht Nioj. Python’s simple, easy-to-learn syntax emphasizes readability and therefore reduces the cost of program maintenance. Cybertrucks are great."
vunderba 3y ago
Kind of. Midjourney V6 has certainly improved image coherence by a fair margin, but for complex prompts where accuracy is important, DALL-E 3 still has the edge. Comparisons I made a while ago: https://imgur.com/a/2GTRjfK https://imgur.com/a/2GTRjfK I will update with v6 later this evening. Unfortunately OpenAI is the most censored, though in my tests, the DALL-3 API is less restrictive than using DALL-E via the ChatGPT interface.
- JaumeGreen 3y ago
  One of my dogs is white with black spots over her body, with very curious facial features. Her right eye is surrounded by a big black spot, her right ear is heavily spotted but still quite white. Her left ear has a black spot centered on its base that covers the whole ear, her right eye has white all around. I've not managed to make Dall-E to draw her. I wanted it to draw 2 people with certain characteristics with two generic dogs with certain colours (nothing complex on the dog side). Up to the two people and a dog it more or less managed. Adding the last dog and the location made it mangle everything. All through the chat interface. For me it's still lacking on some things.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    I just cut-and-pasted your description and it did a pretty credible job: https://i.imgur.com/arj2h1K.png https://i.imgur.com/arj2h1K.png Most notable failure is that it got the left/right POV wrong. If you are still using DALL-E, that's probably not the latest model, and if you're using the free chat interface it definitely isn't. Try using ChatGPT4 directly.
    - JaumeGreen 3y ago
      That's not good enough for me. It doesn't listen to all of the instructions.
      - Izkata 3y ago
        You do have "right eye" in there twice with opposite instructions.
CuriouslyC 3y ago
Text generation is only B tier if you try to give it a vague prompt and let it run on. There is a process to text gen, GPT4 can generate very good text if you tell it to generate a short summary given guard rails, coach it and then tell it to expand the text, then tell it to expand previously generated sections of text.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Maybe I judge it harshly because dealing with copy was my day job for a long time. I can tell good copy from great copy instantly, and all the AI examples I’ve seen haven’t come close to “great”. I would imagine a great programmer would feel the same way about AI generated code.
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    I've found that ChatGPT is very good at fine grained generation - you can get it to rewrite sentences and paragraphs with some examples and a general statement of style and it can produce extremely high quality output. Likewise, it can produce very high quality output when given a summary and asked to expand it into a short article, particularly when given areas to emphasize or things to note as it rewrites the content. The key is to prompt carefully and provide concrete examples in addition to referencing the style you want. That combined with keeping the bot on a fairly short leash can produce fantastic writing, you just need to inject the wit and unusually clever ideas yourself.
holoduke 3y ago
For a little more than text to image I would add Stable Diffusion with complex workflow tools like ComfyUI. The amount of different loras, controlnets and image to image or video to image is becoming very useful for various industries. Much more so than simple prompting. Think of upscaling, faceswapping, animation, rotoscoping and much more.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  SD is very, very good with a great workflow, but for ordinary folks, and even for the quality of images, I’ve found Midjourney v6 to be absolutely incredible. The combination of prompt adherence and ease of use is hard to beat. Once there is a web app, it would be even easier
throwaway914 3y ago
At my org - I've been using it to counter disappointing performance reviews in a professional way that aligns with policy to "further develop the employee". I've use it to create first drafts of proposals for changing business processes (saved me hours of time just outlining an argument). I've uploaded most of our PDFs and had it do some "fuzzing" in a sense to find logic errors, or slightly diverging interpretations of policy terms. This has been used to feedback to our policy and planning folks to cover a hole, or clarify some random document. I've definitely used AI to respond to a bad coworker or supervisor when I'm depressed I have to suffer under/around them. I still proofread the mistakes, but I make more mistakes when I'm trying to sound professional and just depressed about the work. Took this to a dark place, but there's more success than papering over BS. I've helped get 4 new benefits for our employee type with my proposals and the supporting "evidence" the LLM can drag up and justify in an opening brief. The type of employee I am is expected to receive 22% higher pay this year. I used to think I don't have the bandwidth or headspace for understanding our collection of policy documents. There are rare experts. LLMs have lowered the barrier to entry for m e to contribute. I wish I could be specific, but I helped uncover that certain benefits were not available to the type of employee I am, and how previous pay comparisons were done assuming something about total compensation. Well, my employee doesn't have benefits so the numbers they were comparing against were not representative of us. Got a proposal in there, an got a few executives to say "ohh". It's been fun.
hackerlight 3y ago
> That said, you can get a MASSIVE productivity boost I'm 25-50% more productive now. ChatGPT 3.5 did nothing for me (too much bad code) but newer models made the difference. GPT-5+ will be incredbile.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Its especially great for the boring stuff like writing tests, error logs, etc.
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    Anything low stakes in a popular language (e.g. Python). I write a lot of ephemeral code in Python and for that it's perfect.
jononor 3y ago
Can we please say "written _with_ AI" (or using), instead of "by AI" when describing these things? It is a human in the driver seat, triggering and controlling via prompts. I think the distinction is important because a lot of people out there are thinking of "AI" as autonomous agents (and making arguments and conclusions based on that). And generative text and image model generally has no such autonomy.

dartos 3y ago

Maybe I work in stacks not present in the training set, but the code I get from chatgpt is awful. Often convoluted, rarely easy to read. Sometimes it’s not even valid. Copilot is pretty good at predicting what I was about to type thought. It’s great for configs or repeating data structures

spaceman_2020 3y ago
Raw chatGPT is indeed getting pretty poor at coding, even GPT-4. Grimoire has been excellent for me. But then again, my stack likely has more training data than anything out there (Javascript)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gs17 3y ago
I've had a similar experience comparing the two. >It’s great for configs or repeating data structures It saves me a lot of time adding logging statements too. Unfortunately, it's pretty hit or miss with doc comments.

MrVandemar 3y ago

> 1. Midjourney v6 is absolutely fantastic for creating editorial images and brand images. And I believe they're all currently uncopyrightable. I'm unsure if that means they're automatically public-domain, but I guess if you see something you like that someone else has generated, you can use it yourself!

copperx 3y ago
The moment your touch a pixel of that image with Photoshop you should be able to copyright it, right?
- nyrikki 3y ago
  Théâtre D'opéra Spatial was highly modified in Photoshop, didn't help that case. Any 'de minimis' changes will probably lead to rejection.
  - hmcq6 3y ago
    That might be a slightly over-simplistic explanation. "The Copyright Office agreed that the parts of the painting that Allen had altered with Adobe constituted original work. However, it maintained that other parts generated by AI could not be copyrighted. In other words: Allen could copyright parts of the painting, but not the whole thing." https://www.wired.com/story/ai-art-copyright-matthew-allen/ https://www.wired.com/story/ai-art-copyright-matthew-allen/ For now, it seems the issue is still being disputed
    - tomrod 3y ago
      This seems like such a dumb approach to maintain a completely broken system!
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  Not a lawyer, suspect you either need to make significant creative transformations, or generate something that's trademark protected.

j45 3y ago

Solving problems in areas or ways that AI can't touch will continue to become more valuable. So to the degree one is in those unknown areas right now it is improtant.

spaceman_2020 3y ago
I think the demand for A tier players will skyrocket. And you will see more demand for people with taste and intuition. Like AI can generate images, but if you have someone without taste directing it, the results are going to be poor. Personally, feel very excited. I have a vivid imagination but I always focused on writing instead of learning to draw or paint. I can finally use the skills I know (writing) to recreate the ideas I have in my mind. Even for brand content, feels incredible that I can think “this landing page will probably look good if we have an abstract geometric shape here”, and then just…create it.

AlienRobot 3y ago

>Some of the output you can get from it beats the top agency talent I've worked with >I would never trust any AI tool to actually write on my behalf That's because AI is unreliable. Algorithms are deterministic, but AI is probabilistic. You can trust the algorithm will always do its job, but AI will only "probably" do its job. The best thing we can say about AI is that it will probably fail less than a human. AI is like rolling a die. Sometimes you get a 10. Other times you get an 1. And other times you get a 20. That's why the best uses of AI, in my opinion, have been in areas where the AI only needs to go beyond a human capability once, rather than in areas where you need a constant reliable output. For example, when AI is used to designed a sorting algorithm faster than what humans have ever created, or when it's used to design structures for space rockets. In these cases it doesn't matter that the AI fails at its job 99.99999999% of the times. It only needs to surpass human ingenuity once and we can use that design forever. When I hear about using AI as a replacement for search results for example, or in this case for a textbook or tutorial, what enters my mind is... just read an actual written by a real human. If this is unfeasible because search engines suck or because the articles are written in a very confusing way, maybe we should try fixing how we search for humanly-written articles and how we write articles, rather than using AI to generate the text of the articles and then AI to digest the content of articles for you.

plagiarist 3y ago
AI is pretty nice for search right now (compared to the incumbents) because nobody has figured out how to jam ads in all over the place and they are not yet victim to SEO that results in garbage listicles for every query.
- wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
  Just you wait. real time seo spam flashing or injected into response inbound.
- AlienRobot 3y ago
  It's great because it has no reputation to blemish and it knows you will read it, so it can do things like: >What is python? "Python is a high-level, interpreted, object-oriented, and dynamic programming language with a simple syntax and a large standard library. Buy Coca-Cola®. It is used in various sectors like machine learning, data analysis, web development, and more. Yvan eht Nioj. Python’s simple, easy-to-learn syntax emphasizes readability and therefore reduces the cost of program maintenance. Cybertrucks are great."

vunderba 3y ago

Kind of. Midjourney V6 has certainly improved image coherence by a fair margin, but for complex prompts where accuracy is important, DALL-E 3 still has the edge. Comparisons I made a while ago: https://imgur.com/a/2GTRjfK https://imgur.com/a/2GTRjfK I will update with v6 later this evening. Unfortunately OpenAI is the most censored, though in my tests, the DALL-3 API is less restrictive than using DALL-E via the ChatGPT interface.

JaumeGreen 3y ago
One of my dogs is white with black spots over her body, with very curious facial features. Her right eye is surrounded by a big black spot, her right ear is heavily spotted but still quite white. Her left ear has a black spot centered on its base that covers the whole ear, her right eye has white all around. I've not managed to make Dall-E to draw her. I wanted it to draw 2 people with certain characteristics with two generic dogs with certain colours (nothing complex on the dog side). Up to the two people and a dog it more or less managed. Adding the last dog and the location made it mangle everything. All through the chat interface. For me it's still lacking on some things.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  I just cut-and-pasted your description and it did a pretty credible job: https://i.imgur.com/arj2h1K.png https://i.imgur.com/arj2h1K.png Most notable failure is that it got the left/right POV wrong. If you are still using DALL-E, that's probably not the latest model, and if you're using the free chat interface it definitely isn't. Try using ChatGPT4 directly.
  - JaumeGreen 3y ago
    That's not good enough for me. It doesn't listen to all of the instructions.
    - Izkata 3y ago
      You do have "right eye" in there twice with opposite instructions.

CuriouslyC 3y ago

Text generation is only B tier if you try to give it a vague prompt and let it run on. There is a process to text gen, GPT4 can generate very good text if you tell it to generate a short summary given guard rails, coach it and then tell it to expand the text, then tell it to expand previously generated sections of text.

spaceman_2020 3y ago
Maybe I judge it harshly because dealing with copy was my day job for a long time. I can tell good copy from great copy instantly, and all the AI examples I’ve seen haven’t come close to “great”. I would imagine a great programmer would feel the same way about AI generated code.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  I've found that ChatGPT is very good at fine grained generation - you can get it to rewrite sentences and paragraphs with some examples and a general statement of style and it can produce extremely high quality output. Likewise, it can produce very high quality output when given a summary and asked to expand it into a short article, particularly when given areas to emphasize or things to note as it rewrites the content. The key is to prompt carefully and provide concrete examples in addition to referencing the style you want. That combined with keeping the bot on a fairly short leash can produce fantastic writing, you just need to inject the wit and unusually clever ideas yourself.

holoduke 3y ago

For a little more than text to image I would add Stable Diffusion with complex workflow tools like ComfyUI. The amount of different loras, controlnets and image to image or video to image is becoming very useful for various industries. Much more so than simple prompting. Think of upscaling, faceswapping, animation, rotoscoping and much more.

spaceman_2020 3y ago
SD is very, very good with a great workflow, but for ordinary folks, and even for the quality of images, I’ve found Midjourney v6 to be absolutely incredible. The combination of prompt adherence and ease of use is hard to beat. Once there is a web app, it would be even easier

throwaway914 3y ago

At my org - I've been using it to counter disappointing performance reviews in a professional way that aligns with policy to "further develop the employee". I've use it to create first drafts of proposals for changing business processes (saved me hours of time just outlining an argument). I've uploaded most of our PDFs and had it do some "fuzzing" in a sense to find logic errors, or slightly diverging interpretations of policy terms. This has been used to feedback to our policy and planning folks to cover a hole, or clarify some random document. I've definitely used AI to respond to a bad coworker or supervisor when I'm depressed I have to suffer under/around them. I still proofread the mistakes, but I make more mistakes when I'm trying to sound professional and just depressed about the work. Took this to a dark place, but there's more success than papering over BS. I've helped get 4 new benefits for our employee type with my proposals and the supporting "evidence" the LLM can drag up and justify in an opening brief. The type of employee I am is expected to receive 22% higher pay this year. I used to think I don't have the bandwidth or headspace for understanding our collection of policy documents. There are rare experts. LLMs have lowered the barrier to entry for m e to contribute. I wish I could be specific, but I helped uncover that certain benefits were not available to the type of employee I am, and how previous pay comparisons were done assuming something about total compensation. Well, my employee doesn't have benefits so the numbers they were comparing against were not representative of us. Got a proposal in there, an got a few executives to say "ohh". It's been fun.

hackerlight 3y ago

> That said, you can get a MASSIVE productivity boost I'm 25-50% more productive now. ChatGPT 3.5 did nothing for me (too much bad code) but newer models made the difference. GPT-5+ will be incredbile.

spaceman_2020 3y ago
Its especially great for the boring stuff like writing tests, error logs, etc.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  Anything low stakes in a popular language (e.g. Python). I write a lot of ephemeral code in Python and for that it's perfect.

jononor 3y ago

Can we please say "written _with_ AI" (or using), instead of "by AI" when describing these things? It is a human in the driver seat, triggering and controlling via prompts. I think the distinction is important because a lot of people out there are thinking of "AI" as autonomous agents (and making arguments and conclusions based on that). And generative text and image model generally has no such autonomy.