As you can tell by the frequency of posting, I haven’t had much attention to spare for this side project in recent years!
What’s been taking precedence? Well – dogs, cats, spouse, day-job, and watching the political, economic, and legal landscape of my home country change dramatically…
As a follow-up to my last post (in 2022…), I also lost my taste for AI image generation – there are just too many reasons NOT to indulge in such exploitative and ethically questionable tech when I can easily switch to photography or drawing as a hobby. I understand that some people have reasonable arguments for why it’s acceptable to them, and I’m not so intense that I’ll boycott a company that uses it – as long as they’re not using it instead of human artists, and they’re taking care to avoid the AI tendency to generate close copies of copyrighted work without warning.
I do use AI in different forms – it’s unavoidable if your work primarily involves being on a computer all day! But I try to be mindful of its weaknesses as well as its strengths, and to be the “voice of reason” when we’re implementing AI at work.
For example – I’m all for using an AI trained on internal content to create summaries and learning objectives that are then reviewed by a subject matter expert for accuracy prior to serving them to customers. It can save a lot of time, and it’s only drawing on OUR copyrighted work.
I’m a little more reserved when it comes to pushing an AI feature that customers will interact with directly. When you’re doing that, I think it’s important to be very clear about what it CAN and CAN’T do, where it’s pulling information from, and how the user can dig deeper if they want to fact-check or get more authoritative information from a (human) expert.
It will be interesting to see where the AI boom goes over the next few years. Right now, companies are rushing to add “AI” features (meaning generative AI and LLMs specifically) to every product they can, whether users want them or not. (looking at you, Meta!) But even before ChatGPT and MidJourney exploded on the scene, companies were using machine learning to make life easier for users – they just didn’t call it AI, and the features were driven by user demand rather than fad-chasing. I’m hopeful that we’ll see a return to that approach before too long.
In the meantime, I’ve taken the AI images off my Redbubble, and eventually I may add some more photos. 🙂