The productivity promise (and perils) of generative AI
There’s a lot of tech industry excitement these days about tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E that fall into a class called generative AI. Generative AI looks at existing work and generates a result that seems unique, but is actually derived from what it’s viewed. (I’d argue this is how most people produce work — by taking what they’ve learned from others to create a skill set that can be used independently of those earlier references.)
Like many others, I really enjoy working out the concept of something I want to create, but I get bored quickly when executing that concept. This reminds me of an old friend who bought a knock-off Ferrari kit car. Coming up with the dream of driving it was easy and fun, but actually putting in the thousands of hours to build it was too much. It sat in his garage, unbuilt. With these tools, you can focus on the fun part of creation (coming up with an idea), and then let the tools step in to do the tedious part of bringing everything to fruition.