Generative AI: a reading list
Generative AI. You’ve probably heard this expression quite a bit recently, perhaps accompanied by dystopian visions of a future run by automated machines or equally, projections of a civilisation freed by this panacean technology. But what is generative AI actually, why is everyone talking about it, and why does it matter?
The following list of articles, Twitter threads, blog posts, podcasts, and books is an attempt to cut through the unchecked hyperbole and direct you to the most interesting angles on the topic. Our list collects explainers, think pieces and investigative journalism from writers, artists, academics, social scientists, and executives on the most urgent questions around the technology, for example: how might innovations in chatbots such as ChatGPT affect work in the creative industries? Can deep learning models such as DALL-E contribute to cutting-edge healthcare solutions? And what protections around this technology do we need to prevent it from spreading disinformation and potentially harmful media?
How this technology – still very much in its infancy – will alter life as we know it is still anyone’s guess, but the inevitability of its future impact is undeniable. So this scrapbook of ideas and perspectives is a first step at tracing how generative AI might come to shape, warp, and possibly redefine our relationships to technology, each other, and ourselves.
(NB: A human wrote this article, we promise)
Generative AI is here. Who Should Control It?
Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton interview the founder of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, on the proprietary implications of his open-source Stable Diffusion image generator.
“This tool is the purest example of a tool for expression that you can possibly get. I’d say it’s very interesting in an American context to call for regulation of a tool for expression. But it’s part of this bigger thing of who is responsible for AI?”
Your Creativity Won’t Save Your Job From AI
In his weekly Work in Progress newsletter, Derek Thompson problematises the assumption that creative jobs are immune from being taken over by AI, foreseeing a future with both “awful and awesome possibilities”.
“We may be in a “golden age” of AI, as many have claimed. But we are also in a golden age of grifters and Potemkin inventions and aphoristic nincompoops posing as techno-oracles… So far, this technology hasn’t replaced any journalists, or created any best-selling books or video games, or designed some sparkling-water advertisement, much less invented a horrible new form of cancer. But you don’t need a wild imagination to see that the future cracked open by these technologies is full of awful and awesome possibilities.”
Symmetrical protein structures generated by Chroma
Biotech labs are using AI inspired by DALL-E to invent new drugs
Will Douglas Heaven on how the expansive capabilities of DALL-E could be crucial in designing specific proteins for novel medicines.
“These protein generators can be directed to produce designs for proteins with specific properties, such as shape or size or function. In effect, this makes it possible to come up with new proteins to do particular jobs on demand. Researchers hope that this will eventually lead to the development of new and more effective drugs.”
What is AI chatbot phenomenon ChatGPT and could it replace humans?
An explainer on ChatGPT, the latest prototype dialogue-based chatbot from OpenAI, and what it might mean for search, knowledge building, and content production.
"Soon you will be able to have helpful assistants that talk to you, answer questions, and give advice. Later you can have something that goes off and does tasks for you. Eventually you can have something that goes off and discovers new knowledge for you.”
That AI Chatbot Wrote a Pretty Decent New York Article
New York Magazine contributor Ben Jacobs fed ChatGPT this rather entertaining premise: “Write a 2024 presidential debate between former New York mayor Bill de Blasio and former president Donald Trump. De Blasio attacks Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Trump responds by attacking de Blasio for abandoning his campaign pledge on the Central Park carriage horses.” The result is worth a read.
“Mr. De Blasio, you talk about democracy, but what about the way you treated the Central Park carriage horses?” Trump said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
Is AI Art Really Art?
Does generative AI “think” or have a “consciousness”? Does it matter? Writer and author Ed Simon on the debate around authorial intentionality and meaning.
“Regardless of whether this new world will be good or bad, it’s coming. Perhaps with the final death of the author, beauty, truth, and meaning will be dissipated outward, so that intentionality will be where we find it.”
Ethan Mollick Twitter Thread
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick on the impressive updates to Midjourney’s text-to-image translation, plus some intriguing insights on AI’s potential boost to human capabilities.
“When AI is better than humans, it makes humans better. In 2016, the Go world was shocked when AI beat the best human player. Since then, by playing against AI, professional players have gotten unprecedentedly better at the world's oldest game.”
A Journey Inside Our Unimaginable Future
(Warning: The following content may be distressing for some viewers.)
Ange Lavoipierre on the curious case of Loab, an accidentally generated AI character whose images of extreme gore and violence have been plaguing the web.
“But many experts in the field are alarmed about much broader and more serious consequences that lie around the corner… In short, people might develop a broad suspicion that the images and text we encounter online are completely unverifiable… It wouldn’t matter if it was fake or real. The point is that our sense of trust would be irrevocably compromised.”
Reality collapse thanks to Facebook; open source speech rec; AI culture wars.
In former policy director at OpenAi and co-founder of Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, Jack Clark’s weekly newsletter, he shares his latest thoughts on the beauty and terror of Facebook’s Make-A-Video system.
“This form of fractal reality is a double-edged sword – everyone gets to create and live in their own fantasies that can be made arbitrarily specific, and that also means everyone loses a further grip on any sense of a shared reality. Society is moving from having a centralized sense of itself to instead highly individualized choose-your-own adventure islands, all facilitated by AI.”
At play with DALL-E 2: fieldnotes from the algorithm
Early reflections from ReD’s Ian Dull and Ariel Abonizio that positions DALL-E not as an existential threat, but as a new medium for creativity.
“DALL-E renders style a commodity: it is no longer something to develop and perfect over time, but the easiest guardrail for producing a work of art in line with your intent – as much a commodity as the common paintbrush. Mastery is unlikely to be exhibited in the end product alone, but rather in the vision and the process.”
Pharmako-AI by K Allado McDowell
What would it be like to talk to an AI? The following is an extract from Pharmako-AI by K Allado McDowell, an experimental conversation and the first book co-created with GPT-3 offering a hallucinatory dive into selfhood, ecology, cyberpunk, ancestry, and biosemiotics.
“There is a crisis in species loss, yes, but that’s because it signals an emergent danger to awareness. We need to be aware of the danger, and its repercussions: an impoverished, shrunken notion of self, which is not so much a loss of freedom, as an absence of self, a lack of form, a deanimated, comatose absence of life.”