Generative AI and where each of us fits in - ChatGPT Tutorial

- It might seem incredible, but we're now in an age where in a matter of minutes, I can create a well-written blog post to promote my business, design some unique artwork options to accompany it, generate a nice background music track for my podcast, and put together some snappy social media posts to promote it all. All of this is thanks to the power of generative artificial intelligence. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence where people can provide a specific prompt that guides a computer to create new, original content like text, images, video, audio, and more. Let's talk a bit about how this works. When an AI is originally created, it's fed training data, lots and lots of training data, images, text, voice recordings. It depends on the type of AI being trained, but in every case, the AI learns through the input of massive amounts of information. Once the AI model has been trained, people can ask it to make something new, often by writing a short piece of text called a prompt. The AI then attempts to create a novel artifact, an image, collection of text, an audio or video recording, and if done well, the results reflect what the prompt asked for, whether that's a realistic photo, a surreal image of a sci-fi robot, a poem, or a set of instructions. Let's take an example of image-based generative AI. If an AI model is fed thousands of images of a horse and is taught by people that each of those images is a horse, it eventually learns what a horse should look like. Then when someone asks it to create a horse, it generates a completely authentic looking, unique image of a horse that doesn't actually exist on earth. This alone is pretty neat, but as you can see here, this can get really intricate. Generate a blue horse crossing a river in the darkness under a full moon in the style of Van Gogh. Pretty amazing, right? And if that doesn't impress you, take a look at this website, which is full of people's faces who don't actually exist. Things work similarly for text-based generative AI. Let's take the example of ChatGPT, which is trained on a massive dataset of human-generated text from the internet. When a person provides a prompt, ChatGPT uses patterns and relationships that it learned from the training data to generate a unique response. Let's go back to my examples from earlier, and let me show you the type of prompt that generated my personal blog post. Notice how I define the tone as well as the main details that I want to emphasize. And here's my prompt for my snappy social media posts. Pretty straightforward, but it's a great way to mass create useful social content. There's a lot of excitement about this tech. Already, creative pros use image generation tools to brainstorm and ideate. Professionals use text generation tools to streamline all sorts of writing. And people with communication challenges use these tools to help them overcome their impairments. Now, at the same time, some also have fear and skepticism about this tech. Some are scared that deep fakes could deceive entire populations, or that jobs traditionally done by people may disappear or change. There's also ethical concerns and issues around copyright and bias. Now, positive, negative, and in between, all of these reactions are valid. This technology is evolving rapidly, and we're all on this journey together. But we each have a say in where this journey takes us, because after all, for generative AI to be used effectively, people must be involved every step of the way. You need people to train the AI and to provide valuable feedback to improve and maintain its accuracy. You need people to create those well crafted prompts, and you need people to thoughtfully check, analyze, and edit the results. Yes, generative AI will certainly change how many of us live and work, but the collective spark of our humanity is something we cannot underestimate. We need clever, creative, collaborative people to make it all work. And that's where you come in. Learn about the possibilities and the issues. Use the tools, but evaluate the results. Create a free OpenAI account, try out ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, and other powerful generative AI tools and be a part of the generation of people who help usher this technology into the next chapter.