General AI thread

[Thunderplex]

31 minutes ago, Fog Dude said:

As for D&D, I'm not into tabletop myself so I'll tread carefully but I thought the whole appeal of that for people who do like it was using your own creative flair to come up with a fantasy scenario and all its twists and turns largely off the top of your head?

It is, but sometimes you need a bit of inspiration to move things on, and some quick characters to interact with.  

[BomberPat]

On 4/20/2025 at 3:13 PM, Devon Malcolm said:

Technology like AI should exist to do tasks in our lives that free up time so we can create and express ourselves. Instead people are using it to create. We're fucking doomed.

On 4/20/2025 at 3:19 PM, Sphinx said:

We're having different conversations through misinterpretation. I'm saying on a technical level in regards to recreating what The Day Today cast would look like as Muppets, it's as good or better than someone creating the same thing on Photoshop and much quicker, hence the growing appeal.

The other conversation is would the content be more entertaining if it was created in Photoshop because a human would be able to realise 'this makes it funnier' and there's a creative process.

There's two points here - one is that for the most part we're not using it to "create", we're using it do what Sphinx is talking about, which is these Muppets posts and "what you would look like as an action figure". We're having the wrong conversation if the question is "if we created these images in Photoshop, would they be better/funnier than what AI created?", because we simply wouldn't be creating them. These are not creative acts, they're lazy memes. People aren't doing AI "show me what I would look like as a Muppet" as a substitute for creating art, they're doing it as a substitute for whatever the last social media trend was - it's the equivalent of a Buzzfeed "what Harry Potter character am I?" quiz more than it's any actual act of invention or creativity. 

As an act of creativity, it's almost completely useless, and no matter how many times I've had people tell me, "but the technology keeps getting better, soon it will definitely be able to...", it's never going to get good enough to replace human creativity. It will get good enough for unscrupulous cost-cutting bosses to use it instead of actually hiring creative people, and we're already seeing that happen with people using AI-generated logos and other images in advertising - a graphic designer friend of mine said that he's not worried about AI replacing people like him, he's worried about AI lowering the standards of people who would normally be prepared to pay someone like him. 
 

[Guest]

I've been playing with how to use AI for work for a while now. In my line of work, I'd be absolutely crazy not to, because if I just leave it and hope it goes away, someone will get it in their head that it's good enough to replace us, whereas if I suggest a way it integrates, I'll be in more control of how to use it. We, of course, have our own model, which is not at the level of the best "paid for" models out there, but it literally has a button that says "draft a speech" so I've been messing with it. As always, if you put crap inputs in, you get crap outputs out, but as I've honed those and added the right docs, it's been better. It can adequately complete the most boilerplate commissions, if it's well looked after.  Big set pieces though? Not a chance yet, if ever, and the uncanny valley is still a thing in spoken word.

I had a good conversation with a comms bigwig in a big tech company recently, and he talked about how he's input all of Ted Sorensen's style into a custom GPT and farmed it out to all their mid-level execs, the ones who absolutely suck at presenting. They'll never become the best, but it gets them from awful to adequate. His advice for using for creativity was to make it ask you questions rather than give you answers, and I've been using it like for journalling, sermon prep, idea generation and research ever since, where it's been an absolute game changer. I'm an external processor, and I get it to reflect what I've said back at me, ask me questions and occasionally check stuff for accessibility and flow. It works really well for that, not generating content, not even shaping it, but just opening up different avenues of thought. And yeah, sometimes I'll have writers block and say "I need 5 metaphors that say this about this". Some of those are great. Some are not, but it shaves a load of frustrating time off. 

 

Edited April 23, 2025 by Duke
Equally, we're a bunch of people using a web forum in 2025, so we might not be the most change hungry people in the world...

[Chest Rockwell]

What do you mean by getting it to ask you questions? Can you explain? Probably a total noob question; I haven't really played around with them much. 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

What do you mean by getting it to ask you questions? Can you explain? Probably a total noob question; I haven't really played around with them much. 

So, in the custom instructions in GPT, I have given it the instructions to only ask me questions. That means all of it's responses are asking me questions like "what are you trying to accomplish?" "Who's the audience?" "How does this connect with the other files you've uploaded" etc. Or I'll ask it to examine what I've written through the lens of speechwriters I love and ask critical questions it think they would ask.

 

I've also used it to create a drafting template with a load of these questions built in (What's the central metaphor? What's the frontline, outline, headline, sideline, bottom line etc) , so I can access at any time.

Edited April 23, 2025 by Duke

[Onyx2]

I'm all in on ChatGPT for productivity and ideation. 

Like Sir Duke says it's all in the setup. If you feed it lots of base information and how you want answers detailed you get more useful results. 

Just this week I was looking for a new video project. I brainstormed with ChatGPT outlining what I was trying to achieve and it came out with the most brilliant concept that I'm going to develop further. Plus two or three other weaker ideas that can form the basis of future projects. 

Here's the response I gave for work based stuff recently:

Before this AI onslaught I always said to colleagues 'it's easier to edit than create' ie start with a draft and it's easy to see what's wrong. That's where ChatGPT / Copilot gets you to that first early stage. Never trust the output, but assume some lackey has made it for you and edit accordingly. 

[Sphinx]

Yeah, I've found it to be very useful when you know how to 'talk' to it and think of the best ways to put it to use. Still with faults of course, but I'm using the free version of ChatGPT and again its in its relative infancy.

I'd say that it could become as good as human creativity in some areas. I'm not saying I like that answer, but it wouldn't surprise me if it creates a score or piece of music, for example, that is really great. But I think that because it wasn't created by a human we probably won't hold it in as high esteem as any legendary song or composer. There'll be no story behind the artist, no struggle, no performance. Unless, say, a pop artist has a song that uses AI for songwriting over humans, and then there's more of a brand and face attached. But I do think that, in time, it will likely create belters - it has the history of digital recorded music to learn from and draw from.

[tiger_rick]

Santiago Lastra was on Off Menu recently and spoke about his use of it, which was quite interesting. I think it's strength is as an advanced Google search. Certainly some of the clever stuff they were using it for, such as searching for recipes that only use ingredients you have, or searching in multiple languages, makes a lot of sense. 

Anything creative, it's at best a bit of nonsense and at worst, blatant forgery and I'd like to see some massive lawsuits against the tech companies for the clear breach of people's IP. 

Work wise, we have a few people who use it to solve coding issues or write code. From everything I've seen, it's no more convenient than using Google and working through Stack Overflow or something. Certainly the amount of work you have to put into the prompts to get anything useful out, I think you might as well have used Google. 

I can see it might be useful for Software testing and other such tedious jobs. It still needs a person to teach it but it'd make someone's job a whole lot more fulfilling, I suspect.

[LaGoosh]

2 hours ago, Sphinx said:

I'd say that it could become as good as human creativity in some areas. I'm not saying I like that answer, but it wouldn't surprise me if it creates a score or piece of music, for example, that is really great

But it's not creating anything is it?! It's just regurgitating things that have already been created. Truly good art and creativity is when something new is created by the fresh perspective and utterly unique and original mindset of a human being. How will AI ever create anything new and original?

AI should be used for crunching masses of data, eliminating admin tasks therefore freeing up humans to do more valuable work, improving processes and making our lives more convenient. 

It should be fucking illegal to use it to "create art" in any form whatsoever.

Edited April 23, 2025 by LaGoosh

[Jazzy G]

On 4/22/2025 at 6:23 PM, Thunderplex said:

It is, but sometimes you need a bit of inspiration to move things on, and some quick characters to interact with.  

You can get the AI to churn out all the cannon fodder enemies etc, then you have more time for the meatier characters in the campaign. 

[Hannibal Scorch]

I will say I did end up using chat gpt in my job search in the end. That said I used it for inspiration or checking and what I learned was you need to take what it throws out and make it yours. I can imagine an A1 Steak Sauce written book or script alone would be pretty horrific. But if you told me HHH booked Wrestlemania 41 using it, I could believe it.

 

Oh and if you do use it, remember to say please and thank you. They will be our overlords one day after all.

Edited April 23, 2025 by Hannibal Scorch

[Sphinx]

1 hour ago, LaGoosh said:

But it's not creating anything is it?! It's just regurgitating things that have already been created. Truly good art and creativity is when something new is created by the fresh perspective and utterly unique and original mindset of a human being. How will AI ever create anything new and original?

AI should be used for crunching masses of data, eliminating admin tasks therefore freeing up humans to do more valuable work, improving processes and making our lives more convenient. 

It should be fucking illegal to use it to "create art" in any form whatsoever.

It's learning from patterns in data and creating something through prompts to sound like something.

Human music isn't immune to it. Like Paul McCartney imitating Little Richard or Oasis ripping from The Beatles or whichever indie band ripping from them.

[LaGoosh]

15 minutes ago, Sphinx said:

Human music isn't immune to it. Like Paul McCartney imitating Little Richard or Oasis ripping from The Beatles or whichever indie band ripping from them.

They are not the same thing and you know it. At least I really hope you do.

AI art will always have one use. It's a good way to work out if someone is an idiot or not because only idiots enjoy it.

[TibBo]

It doesn’t ‘learn’ anything does it? It just steals a bit of everything you put in the prompts and tries to amalgamate it into something new, but similar to the original right?

If you are a creative and are influenced by something, but honed your own style through years of practice and study and passion and experience, it is vastly different than intentionally stealing elements of existing artwork but changing it just enough to not get sued.

WCW would have loved it for creating themes tho!

[The Gaffer]

I know arguing this is howling at the moon - and in fairness I'll readily admit nobody's obliged to have a strong empathic resonance to creativity - but even derivative art and entertainment has a human interest element to it. I don't love Oasis, but it's fucking great that so many fan channels painstakingly pour over every little detail of the kind of stuff Noel's re-tooled. 

Only the rich, vapid and not-arsed are going to get a buzz off seeing Tupac, Janis and Elvis headline Resurrection Fest on Simulation Island. And that's fine. Just kind of...I don't know...keep it in a corner as its own thing and don't try and compare it to people enjoying other people doing people things.