AI Creativity
One method of using the existing AI tools is to give them prompts to generate something, and then feeding the output back into the AI with the request to improve the output. Ethan Mollick teaches us this recursive method at his One Useful Thing Substack newsletter, where the Wharton professor reports on his extensive experiments using AI.
Some of the prompts he has described lately involve similar instructions, asking AI to develop prompts for other AI, and then having the first AI rate the output. With some human guidance, the output—while not earth-shattering—is original.
In a recent posting, Mollick described playing with AIs with different specialties: a text-generating large-language model (LLM) working with image-generating AI. Later he described having an AI specialized in human voice input listen to and rate student oral presentations.
The capabilities are quite impressive as they are now. The visual task was to develop a new women’s shoe, have an image-rendering AI produce mockups, and have the original AI review and propose refinements to the original output. The second task was to have a listening AI hear student business presentations and rate them, describing strengths and weaknesses, making suggestions for improvement. As you can see in the linked article, the AI suggestions impressed an actual venture capitalist who witnessed the same presentations.
The whole post is worth reading. I couldn’t quite decide which bits to excerpt other than this teaser from the conclusion:
We got used to AI that was restricted in what it could know about the world. Its knowledge was limited to before 2022. It couldn’t surf the web. It could only know what you typed into a chatbox. And it could only produce text.
One-by-one, these assumptions have changed.
I saw pair of white sneakers today that appear to have been designed by AI. They had 3 inch heels to them. Only 44 euros I was tempted. Katie rolled her eyes.🙄. Of course, we saw a women's jacket that was a blurry floral print. I asked her if it would look good on me. THWOCK! Her eyeroll caused the POS machine to jam. 🙄
I dodged a bullet today, thanks to the metro! We split the students in half (not literally, we don't have enough glue to put them back together), and I hosted about 17 students at a wine tasting. It was in a sketchy part of Rome. But the reason why it is there is that the basement looks like a catacomb. They use it to store bottles of wine.
Each student sampled three wines (a bubbly, white wine, a red wine). Plus we had olives and a really salty cheese. The guide was very knowledgeable, explaining the taste. Since I don't drink, I learned the colder the climate, the darker the grape. Which suggests if you like white wine or bubbly ya really oughtta root for global warming, but I digress.
The students really enjoyed it. They rode a bus, I took the metro. While underground, we got an emergency text message that two young women were trapped in an elevator at their apartment; could one of us go help? By the time I got above ground, the other faculty had taken care of it. 😁. Better yet, they knew I didn't walk due to the heat (over 100), and was taking the metro. So all's good.
Apparently the elevator resumed working, and they are safe. All is well in Rome.
By the way, Matt Yglesias has a great piece on what-about-ism today "Bill Clinton was not a great guy". Unfortunately, it is paywalled, but here's a bit. Speaking of Clinton, he says:
"...if this same pattern of conduct had come to light in a different context, everyone would think that it was pretty bad. More to the point, if Clinton had been more a man of honor who apologized to the nation and said he was going to step down for the good of the country, the good of the party, and the good of his family, almost everyone would have deemed that a sound course of action. Clinton succeeded at exactly what Trump has succeeded at — getting everyone to focus on the fact that his misconduct had been revealed by his enemies, who were people that my family (rightly) didn’t like, and therefore were our enemies, too, so we had to champion his cause. That’s politics for you, but it leads to bad judgment. "
There is also a discussion of downstream consequences of the Dems decision to stand by the Clintons, and the challenges to bringing younger leaders in (they tend to be more left-leaning).