I’ve been deep-diving into a few work / personal projects for the past couple of weeks, and one of those has been the explosion of consumer-facing AI tools.

I don’t just mean those AI-enabled SaaS products that say they’re AI but aren’t actually, or even those products that have accumulated a bunch of data and are now able to perform some AI tasks.

I mean, fully-blown-holy-shit-this-is-a-gamechanger products.

For some, this is viewed as a risk to humanity by “robot-izing” even the most menial jobs. In truth, this has been happening for a while but now, AI is coming after creative pursuits.

Let’s dive into a few projects that I think are on the cusp of something impactful:

1. DALL-E 2

The above is an image from AI image generation tool DALL-E - all you need to do is type in a few prompts and DALL-E will generate an image that matches your text. For the above, I typed in: “DALL-E is taking over the world”.

Let’s try: “Night time in Porto with friends with a nice skyline Picasso style”

This text-to-image generation tool is slick - super easy for anyone to use and experiment with - I’m convincing a few of my friends that are teachers or run education accelerators to integrate this into their curriculum. Knowing how to wield the tools will be increasingly important for the future.

As some background, DALL-E and DALL-E 2 are machine learning models developed by OpenAI to generate digital images - it uses the GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) model, which has over 175bn paramters (aka data sources that it’s crawled to build its data set).

Text-to-image is going to be built for a bunch of different use cases (I can see this being built for different business verticals (e.g. e-commerce, transport etc)).

Saying all of this, there are ethical questions to answer - the AI seems to have picked up certain biases - for example, the prompt, “a flight attendant” generated photos mainly of East Asian women and the prompt “a restaurant” defaulted to showing a Western restaurant setting.

2. Lex

This one is a lot more topical - given Lex launched in the past week and attracted around 25,000 users on the waitlist very quickly.

I’m a huge fan of Every - the writing collective with a ton of great talent. It’s like a hive-mind of excellent brains congregating together who discuss futuristic topics that I love to nerd out about.

Lex is a fully-featured word processor and helps you stay focused on what you’re writing, by generating ideas incase you get stuck (hint: part of this newsletter may have been written by an AI…).

An excellent piece by Jack Raines described how I’m feeling about this perfectly - low-quality content faces an existential threat, and high-quality content is even more valuable. The writers who inject personal stories, get vulnerable and inspire their audience, are the ones who’ll stand out against the threat of an AI taking their writer jobs.

There’s going to be a place for tools like Lex, it just won’t be my place :).

3. Creative Videos

I came across this one on Twitter and my mind was blown - essentially, the Runway ML software makes content creation easy with AI.

felt like DALL-E but on Steroids / combined with a super powerful version of Adobe Premiere. AI and real-time video just seems like an extra-terrestrial has come to tell us about this magical dessert called Cheesecake.

The software allows for things like:

• Super-slow motion

• Erase and replace

• Replace background

• Inpainting

This feels like the next step up from just using filters or photo-editing apps to touch up a few photos - this feels like real-time video generation that can be edited and manipulated as we like.

Now, that’s magic.

The ethical dilemmas behind this will be debated for years to come, but for now, the tools are making their mark.

🔗 Links Of The Week

🧙🏼 How We Onboard Billions to Web3

Zeneca, one of the web3 writers I closely follow, outlines three things we need to do to onboard more people to web3: Education + Infrastructure + A Mentality & Perception Shift.

👨‍👧‍👦 How Do I Teach These Kids?!

Packy McCormick outlines some key things he will aim to teach his kid in this age of ever-changing technological shifts - even though the tools don’t change, how we approach and use this tools for our benefit, do not.

💸 When the Money’s Just Too Damn Good

Nat Eliason, another writer I read a lot of (who’s part of the Every writer collective), wrote about the balance between pursuing our passions and those that pay the bills.

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition - I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two.

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Fahim