Prompt Engineer
I’m catching up on Artificial Intelligence (AI), but that’s hard to do with it evolving so rapidly. In the 1980’s, engineering students were writing about fuzzy logic and hardships in voice recognition. Then there were inference engines interpreting how dirty your laundry might be and thus how to adjust the wash cycle.
Now AI is stepping into art, and thus, more than ever, stepping on some toes.
Google it. You’ll find some absolutely stunning work being remixed and engineered by AI tools like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, etc. Notice I wrote “remixed and engineered,” for I don’t think AI is in the business of creating art…at least not just yet.
I’d like to write something here to spawn comments (not from you overlord AI bots). I will offer this as an opening salvo:
Really? What’s a computer better at than I am?
Spelling.
Okay, there is that.
Math.
Hardly counts.
Tireless diligence and consistency.
Okay, stop it already.
Computers may be better at some stuff, sure. I would venture they’re pretty good at miming art and compiling art and storing art infinite reserves of artistic inspiration, too. I actually like a lot of what I’m seeing come from the AI tools mentioned above.
However, while AI may be able to infer, it cannot honestly think. (That would be a great blog or conversation sometime, eh? what exactly is “thinking?”) Attempts have been made by students at MIT. They generated a number of journal articles using AI—some were even published. They were, even by the most generous standards, nothing but gibberish. Students can now use AI-based apps to paraphrase.
Here’s what such a tool did to a paragraph I wrote above:
Of course, computers can be better in some areas. I guess they're pretty good at mimicking art, compiling art, and archiving art from endless artistic inspiration. I really enjoyed what I saw coming from the AI tools mentioned above.
I use an advanced editing tool that employs AI: ProWriting Aid. It’s great, for it can calibrate to whatever style, readability index, etc. I ask it to use in its critique.
If you’re still reading, you must be a bot, curious as to what we meat puppets have to say about you.
If you’re human and still reading, there’s a great new field opening up: Prompt Engineer. No, not a fast/efficient engineer, but an engineer of prompts to feed to artificial intelligence. I’m going to explore it more, for it sounds like the ideal job. For all this time, we have depended on computers to fix our messes, but now, we can feed computers prompts and they can make their own messes! While that symbiotic relationship makes me smile, helping our little friends who speak in 1’s and 0’s grow and learn…some might say we’re dangerously close to empowering them.
Pish posh. I prefer to think of AI being our friend, not our nemesis, Skynet.
I mean, for a first effort at genning up one of my airships, I don’t think NightCafe did too poorly, do you?
