Keep calm, the next wave of AI is here.
Generative AI. What is it? and why does it matter?
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Generating change
In 2022, a seismic shift is underway. The foundations underlying the creation of digital art, video, 3D objects, text, code, and data are rupturing. Something new is surfacing.
The epicenter of this wave lies in the rise of applications using generative AI — a technology promising to strap a rocket ship to the engine of content creation.
The New York Times recently hailed generative AI’s “coming-out party” and thought leaders hailed the hype around the technology as “absolutely justified.”
However, opinions on the technology are sharply divided — between those who believe its will birth a rising tide of innovation, and those who fear it will drown creativity, impoverish artists, and usher in a lifeless dystopia of soulless creative automation!
Over the next few weeks, I’ll give you an inside view into this amazing new technology, explore its pitfalls and promises, and look at the challenges and possibilities ahead.
Let’s begin!
What is Generative AI?
A simple explanation is that generative AI takes in data, discerns meaning from that data, and produces new ideas and content.
Simple, right?
If you think about it, generating newness from knowledge is something we humans take for granted.
This fact is so innate to us that the thought of anyone or anything else producing “new ideas” makes us a little uncomfy. Imagine if your toaster could suggest new ways of preparing your bread.
As “smart” as your phone is, it can only perform the functions that humans have coded into its design.
Even our furry friends in the animal kingdom can’t generate new ideas in the same way that we can.
Humans have enjoyed dominance over the processes of ideation and creation, using it to invent technology, build civilizations, and produce the greatest masterpieces.
Until now…
Generative AI has joined us in that privileged class. It, too, can create new ideas and content by mimicking the elements of creation — learning, imitation, chaos, iteration, and curation.
The output is curated randomness: content that is novel yet grounded in a prior idea.
Generative art: the first wave
Let me just show you.
No-one created the images in this article. I typed some random text into a field, hit return, and the AI “created” the artwork in a matter of seconds. You can even read the prompts in the captions.
Whether or not you like the outputs isn’t the point. They were produced in less time than it would take have taken me to get my easel and paintbrushes ready.
Factoring in that I have absolutely zero artistic or photographic talent (I struggle to draw stick figures), I can safely say that AI has allowed me to do the impossible.
Several artists have already voiced concerns that their work is being used to generate content without attribution, permission, or compensation.
Some artists are worried that, when generative art floods the internet with hundreds of images looking similar to their own, they will lose both income and relevance.
We’ll address these ethical issues in a later article, but for now, it is important to pay attention to the debates around generative art as a preview of broader things to come.
Broader things?
It is only a matter of time before we see generative technologies integrated into many different types of applications.
Generative AI will revolutionize our cultural and creative landscape, and shift our perceptions of knowledge entirely.
Would you have suspected if I hadn’t told you that the illustrations in this article were entirely computer generated? Does it matter to you? Does it make the output any less valuable to you as the reader?
Now apply that thought to every single idea and knowledge output that we, as humans, generate.
Imagine a world where AI can design award-winning buildings, write bestselling novels, or even write that report that you’ve procrastinated over for weeks.
What does that mean for the already tenuous line between real and fake?
Ok…I’m getting a bit carried away here. The truth is that we don’t yet know exactly how generative AI will work and what its full application will be.
But we know that generative AI is breaking all the rules — blurring the lines between creator and audience, data and output, code and art.
I suspect that we’re in for a wild ride.
Bringing it home
Right now, the challenge is getting generative AI out of the computer clouds and into the hands of everyday folks like you and me.
This moment is special — the rise of generative AI will force society to define new norms. It has already raised questions about ownership, originality, and even the idea of “self”.
It is important that we, as a society, explore these ideas together.
Right now, most people may not even realize what generative AI is, let alone what we can do with it and why it is so important for us to take notice.
So the starting point is to bring it to the people so that we can begin these important conversations.
Vana Portrait
The wonderful thing about generative AI is that it taps into our human desire to be creative.
Playing with these new tools has taken me back to my earliest memories of kindergarten, filled with fun, wonder, and a little bit of chaos.
The return to the “self” underpins the experiences that we are curating at Vana to cultivate understanding of this new technology.
The first of these experiences is Vana Portrait, which allows users to generate beautifully stylized self-portraits using generative AI.
Art is the COO of Vana, a community cultivating understanding and autonomy of the digital self through experiential AI. Vana is creating a system for everyone to immerse themselves in their digital likeness and unleash their creative potential through generative AI.
