If you live long enough you’ll get through many decades of hype and fail especially in tech. I can easily remember the hype around bitcoin and block chain to name a couple. So when AI came around, I kinda rolled my eyes and wondered how long it would take for that hype to die down but I’m coming to terms with being wrong about AI.
AI Services
I started playing with various AI services a few months ago and ultimately ended up getting a paid account on one of them. Most of the images you see on this blog are all AI generated. They are not stock photo or custom artwork created by some firm or person, they are created from word prompts.
Essentially I type in the AI prompt window what I want such as: “create an image of a young boy holding a piggy bank.”
And this image is created. I did not have to hire anyone to create, change, or touch it up. But the amazing thing doesn’t stop there. I can tell the prompt that I want a different style of image such as “neoclassical” and then this pops out.
If this doesn’t blow you away wait until what you see what it can do next.
The latest iteration of AI can create video clips from word prompts! You can read and see the demos here where they entered a word prompt of a dancing kangaroo on a stage and the video was auto created. There are more video clips here and they are mind blowing.
The Alchemist
I have a ton of books that I love such as Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist and would love to see a movie or TV show made from it. Will it be possible in a few years to upload the book and ask an AI prompt to create a video of this book? Think about the possibilities, can we ditch Netflix and simply have our own production studio on our laptop or cell phone?
Skill Sets Needed
The catch though is knowing the right prompts (words) to use to create compelling and interesting images. In my piggy bank example above, I was pretty simple with my word prompt, it was basically a few words but experts will write long highly detailed prompts that incorporate concepts of lighting, cinematography, color schemes, and lenses to name a few.
There are very few people in the world right now that know how to do these things and the demand for those skills will only grow.
Money Saved
For this blog I currently have 71 posts and most of those posts have some type of AI generated image and I only pay for the AI service not the stuff it generates. If I had to spend $10 per image, I’ve easily saved $710 and did not have to deal with copyright issues or copyright trolls. It’s one of the reasons I rebooted this blog too as it makes it really efficient to find images instead of spending hours on stock photo image sites.
AI also has proof reading which I haven’t used yet but probably should because I am finding many typos or mistakes when I go back and read some of my posts. Lol. I have used AI output (non-images) here and here.
The AI service doesn’t just generate images though, there are dozens and dozens of specialized AI modules to focus on finance, engineering, cooking, and more. I’ll be exploring the finance modules more in future posts to see what it can do.
Where To Start
If you want to start somewhere, I suggest you try bing’s free image creator at Bing.com/create. I am fairly certain that AI isn’t hype and the future of the technology and probably in a frightening way.