Generative Ai

I am reading and hearing a lot of discourse about AI, machine learning, and more specifically, ChatGPT. It seems like a lot of people have a lot of opinions and things to say, and, like ChatGPT itself, they seem to be often wrong but never in doubt1. From what I can tell it seems like a lot of it is noise (generally when people make blanket statements about AI being bad and dangerous) but there is some real signal (generally when people use more precise verbiage, detailed use cases, and less sensationalized/more nuanced thoughts and conclusions such as potential for bias at a large scale with large language models and generative AI causing harm2)....

I signed up as a beta user for an AI art generator that uses keywords (text) to create images. The first image I asked it to make was one using the keywords korean queer mermaid liminal space and these are the four options it generated: Four queer Korean mermaids, drawn by a machine (generated by Midjourney) It’s pretty amazing that a computer made these images, and that is obviously a marvel and an incredible feat of technology, although if you look closely you can see where it still needs a little bit of work (for example, in the bottom right panel the face is fairly well done, but I’m not sure what’s happening with the body or why the tail is detached, and the bottom left very much seems like the generator phoned it in)....