092: Mips and bips vs. Desire
[After - Session 01] Muscles. Yoga. Old Apple ads. AI+Creativity Update.
Rick responded to my letter! Good to see us humans engaging each other about how and when the robots will take over.
Also, thank you for the office chair recommendations, dear readers. Did I mention I woke up a week ago and couldn’t move without lower back pain? No evidence of what caused it—no heavy loads, no slipping. Just the cosmos waking me up to my humanity, I guess. Anyway, the deep tissue therapist said it was probably muscles. Then the doctor with the x-ray machine said my spine was “perfect,” so it had to be muscles. And then he gave me the same stretching exercises my wife taught me from decades teaching yoga—and validated her approach with clinical research. #winning
Reflecting on AI extending our abilities
I’m recalling an old Apple Macintosh TV commercial, likely filmed by Joe Pytka, where two office executives are watching their minions—one of whom has a new Mac (but like pre-Mac Quadra, so, Ancient Desktop Mac Times). Everyone else in the cube farm has a PC.
The younger exec asks, “what are you doing?” The older exec responds, “I’m trying to determine which computer is more powerful.”
And the confident younger exec says, “That’s easy—it’s the one with more mips or bips or whatever…” Meanwhile they’re watching the corporate workers slowly but surely crowd around the Mac, where Hero Corporate Worker On The Mac is clearly getting more shit done.
“No,” says the older exec. “I think the more powerful computer…” Hard cut to what looks like the entire office crowded around the Mac. “…is the one people actually want to use.”
(There’s a funny aside that follows, but it obscures my point.)
The appeal of GenAI—what I’ve witnessed with power users—is it unlocking capabilities. “I had no idea I could…” is a common refrain. The subtext of that old Mac spot was an individual can do more—that could be you or your team doing more. I feel the same emotion at work when GenAI works.
I want to use generative AI technologies. Are they perfect? Nope. Often frustrating? Absolutely. But what they have enabled in such a short time span isn’t just remarkable, but encouraging. Again, the technologies are frequently maddening. But who among us remembers any ancient Mac providing peace and tranquility? The power wasn’t the point, what empowered us was, and is.
So we’re going to see what more the students can unlock in their artistic and entrepreneurial journeys.
I’ll post Session 2 “Before” on Sunday.
AI+Creativity Update
👨🏽🎨 File Under: You Could See This Coming — Human illustrator Pablo Delcan will generate your prompt with actual ink and brush. Via It’s Nice That:
“Out of all the drawings Pablo has completed, the favourite prompt has been “forgiveness”. “I think it was just a prompt that helped me take a turn with the project. Where I stopped drawing what I thought people wanted me to draw and instead I started reacting to the prompts in a way that felt that I had a voice and a personal interpretation that I could apply to this work.”
His Prompt Brush site offers some nice data viz, as well.
🍩 File Under: Tasty — This is relatively old news, but still enlightening. What if, to an image-recognition system, a croissant looks a lot like a specific type of cancer? Could a system built to distinguish pastry also be leveraged to distinguish diseases seen microscopically? Pixels are pixels and patterns are patterns.
🤖 File Under: Things Move Fast: Microsoft Copilot, their brand name for all things AI, is out for all to use, priced at three levels. This was mere theory 12 months ago, a demo six months ago, and now live for millions.
Free: Bing has evolved into Copilot.Microsoft.com. I recommend using the Creative mode; the results tend to be more useful and insightful. You’ll need to be logged into a MSFT account to create images.
Copilot Pro = $20/mo. (Same price as ChatGPT v4 Plus) If you have not opted to pay OpenAI for its Plus plan, but you’re using Office365 apps all the time, consider Pro. It enables Copilot inside your 365 apps.
Copilot for Microsoft 365. This is the corporate/teams plan.